Ts  OF  THE  Age 


!^'*•R|«<!^H6*^^Msilv^ 


Columbia  College  Library 

Madison  Av.  and  49th  St.  New  York. 

Besiifc  ihe  main  topic  this  book  a/so  treats  of 
S:<bjecijXo.  On  page  Subject  No.  Onpc'- 


|^"^-^> 


The  Conflicts  of  the  Age 


1.  AN  ADVERTISEMENT   FOR  A  NEW   RELIGION, 

By  an  Evolutionist. 

2.  THE   CONFESSION   OF   AN   AGNOSTIC. 

By  an  Agnostic. 

3.  WHAT   MORALITY   HAVE   WE   LEFT? 

By  a  New  Light  Moralist. 

4.  REVIEW   OF   THE   FIGHT. 

By  a  Yankee  Farmer. 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 

743  AND  745  Broadway 

1881 


Copyright 

CHARLES    SCRIBNER'S    SONS 

iSSi 


Trow's 

Printing  and  Tjookbinding  Company 

201-213  East  \2.th  Street 

NEW  YORK 


23API!-84  5580G 


These  Papers  appeared  lately  in  the  North 
American  Review,  and  are  published  {with  a  few 
additional  paragraphs',  because  they  reflect  the 
opinions  of  the  age. 


CONFLICTS   OF  THE  AGE. 


I. 

AN  ADVERTISEMENT  FOR  A  NEW  RELIGION. 

BY   AN   EVOLUTIONIST. 

Among  our  advanced  thinkers  two  points  are  now 
happily  settled  beyond  the  need  of  further  inquiry  or  even 
the  propriety  of  reconsideration.  One  is,  that  all  the  old 
religions,  including  Christianity,  in  one  sense  the  best  and 
in  another  the  worst  of  them,  are  waxing  old,  and  must 
soon  die.  Each  of  the  creeds  has  had  "  its  little  day,"  as 
our  Broad  Church  poet  sings— little  compared  with  the 
many  and  prolonged  geological  ages,  or  even  with  the 
myriads  of  years  which  have  elapsed  since  the  man-apes 
began  to  stand  upright,  and  try  to  look  up  to  heaven  ; 
but  the  ages  of  the  past  are  merging  into  the  future,  as 
the  dawn  brightens  into  the  day.  First,  fetichism  had  its 
day,  probably  a  very  long,  prehistoric  one,  when  men, 
just  risen  above  monkeys,  struggled  to  speak,  and  had  an 
awe  of  earth-powers  ;  then  came  the  worship  of  the  higher 
works  of  Nature — sun,  moon,  stars,  and  animals  ;  then 
polytheism,  which  divided  the  complex  one  into  many  to 
give  a  power  to  each  agent  of  Nature  ;  next,  or  at  the 
same  time,  hero-worship,  with  idolatry  and  carved  images, 
then  a  pantheism  on  the  rise  of  philosophy,  and  among 
I 


2  Co7iflicts  of  the  Age. 

the  Hebrews  the  exaltation  through  national  pride  of  a 
tribal  god  into  a  One  God,  supposed  to  rule  over  all  the 
world  ;  and  finally  an  incarnate  God,  at  once  divine  and 
human  in  Christianity.  We  now  know  that  all  these  have 
been  developed  out  of  the  rude  ideas  and  wants  of  the 
human  heart,  and  had  their  shape  given  them  by  the 
environment.  Monotheism,  too,  has  had  varied  forms, 
retaining  so  much  of  polytheism  in  its  Virgin  and  angels 
and  saints  in  the  Romish  Church,  and  military  hero- 
worship  in  the  faith  which  shouts  every  morning,  "  Allah  ! 
Allah  !  there  is  one  God,  and  Mohammed  is  his  prophet !  " 
We  can  now  thoroughly  understand  and  explain  all  this 
on  the  grand  new  scientific  principles  of  "  natural  selec- 
tion "  and  "the  struggle  for  existence,"  Lecky  has 
shown  very  skilfully,  in  his  work  on  "  RationaHsm,"  that 
antiquated  systems  pass  away — like  old  men — not  because 
they  have  been  attacked  by  argument,  but  simply  because, 
like  the  races  which  have  perished  slowly  in  the  geologi- 
cal ages,  they  are  not  fitted  to  the  new  circumstances,  and 
cannot  survive  among  the  new  ideas  which  have  sprung 
up  by  spontaneous  generation.  In  the  struggle  for  exist- 
ence, certain  beliefs  are  cast  off,  and  only  those  continue 
which  can  stand  the  new  conditions.  The  Reformers  un- 
dermined the  faith  of  the  Catholic  Church,  and  Mr.  Leslie 
Stephen  has  shown  how  the  deistical  writers  of  the  last 
century  successfully  undermined  the  strangely  mixed  and 
incongruous  faiths  of  the  Hebrew  and  Christian  Scrip- 
tures. Rationalism  and  Unitarianism  have  exposed  so 
much  of  the  weakness  of  the  infallible  Bible  that  shrewd 
men  now  see  that  all  must  go.  The  great  thinkers  of  the 
last  century  and  a  half  have  been  against  the  Bible  : — 
Hume  and  Gibbon,  and  we  may  add  Froude,  among  his- 
torians, fitted  to  examine  evidence;  Voltaire,  Rousseau, 
Goethe,  Sainte-Beuve,  and  Matthew  Arnold,  among  men 
of  literary  genius  ;  while  philosophers  like  Kant,  Fichte, 


Alt  Advcrtisoneiit  for  a  New  Religion.       3 

and  Hegel,  have  looked  coldly  on  inspiration  ;  and  Scho- 
penhauer and  Von  Hartmann  have  shown  how  wretched 
a  world  this  is ;  and  our  great  savants^  Laplace,  Hum- 
boldt, Darwin,  Huxley,  and  Tyndall,  have  set  the  Bible 
aside  as  not  worthy  of  being  looked  at.  Christianity, 
both  in  the  form  of  Popery  and  Protestantism,  has  still 
roots  fixed  in  the  soil ;  but  they  are  like  those  of  the  old 
oaks  which  I  have  seen  in  England,  condemned  as  useless 
for  ship-timber  in  the  days  of  Cromwell,  with  the  top- 
branches  dying  and  ready  to  be  blown  away  by  the  first 
tempest  moving  on  irresistibly  to  fill  up  the  vacuum  cre- 
ated by  the  burning  up  of  old  faiths. 

A  new  era  has  dawned,  more  important  than  the  ter- 
nary, when  mammals  appeared  ;  or  the  quaternary,  when 
man  appeared.  Great  typical  men  have  come  forth, 
undermining  not  only  revealed  but  natural  religion, — it 
is  now  acknowledged  that,  when  the  Bible  is  gone,  no 
rational  religion  can  remain.  Hume  showed  at  one  and 
the  same  time  that  there  is  no  valid  proof  for  the  exist- 
ence of  God,  as  worlds  may  ha.ve  come  into  being  with- 
out a  cause ;  and  that  a  miracle  cannot  be  proved,  men 
being  so  liable  to  delusion  in  such  matters.  Kant  con- 
futed all  the  old  and  venerable  arguments  for  the  Divine 
existence,  and  was  not  very  successful  in  building  up  a 
new  one  by  means  of  the  practical  reason  ;  for,  if  the 
speculative  reason  may  deceive  in  holding  that  every 
effect  has  a  cause,  why  may  not  the  practical  reason,  with 
its  God  and  immortality,  also  be  delusive  ?  Indeed,  the 
practical  reason,  or  conscience,  is  now  shown  by  Bain 
and  Darwin  to  be  simply  the  product  of  circumstances 
and  hereditary.  Comte  has  demonstrated  that  we  cannot 
discover  either  first  or  final  causes — the  two  dark  caves 
from  which  all  religions  have  issued,  like  wild  beasts,  and 
into  which  they  retreat  when  pursued.  Mr.  J.  S.  Mill 
has  admitted  that,  on  the  principle  (which,  however,  has 


4  ,     Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

no  evidence  in  its  favor)  of  causation  being  universal, 
there  may  be  some  presumption  in  favor  of  the  existence 
of  a  God  ;  but  then  he  proves  that  this  God  cannot  be  an 
omnipotent  God,  otherwise  he  would  prevent  the  evil. 
Darwin  has  plucked  from  man's  brow  his  proud  claim 
that  he  was  specially  created  by  God  and  in  God's  image, 
and  has  demonstrated  his  derivation  from  the  ascidian 
through  the  catarrhine  monkey.  Huxley,  the  great 
physiologist,  has  satisfied  naturalists  that  man  does  not 
differ  so  much  from  the  lower  animals  as  they  do  from 
one  another,  or  as  one  portion  of  mankind  differs  from 
another,  and  has  found  a  physical  basis  of  mind,  in  which 
latter  point  he  has  been  followed  by  Lewes.  Last  of  all, 
there  has  risen  up  in  these  times  the  highest  development 
of  all  in  one  who  combines  in  himself  Locke,  wdth  his  ex-  ■ 
perience,  and  Kant,  with  his  forms,  and  has  explained  all 
physical  Nature  by  the  persistence  of  force,  and  all  life 
and  mind  by  the  interaction  of  internal  and  external  rela- 
tions.     I  need  not  say  that  I  refer  to  Herbert  Spencer. 

But  there  is  a  second  truth  admitted  with  nearly  equal 
unanimity — indeed,  by  all  but  a  few  conceited  youths 
who  boast  that  they  have  gone  beyond  all  religion  and 
have  lately  been  talking  very  loudly.  It  is  that  man  has 
religious  instincts — is,  in  short,  a  religious  animal,  and 
must  have  some  sort  of  worship.  Hume  used  to  go  at 
times  to  church  in  Scotland,  and  labored  to  make  the 
moderate  ministers  there,  corresponding  to  the  Unitarian 
ministers  here,  adopt  a  rational  religion.  Kant,  the  intel- 
lectual Samson,  who  brought  down  the  temple  upon 
others,  but  also  on  himself,  left  us  no  God  speculatively, 
but  then  he  called  in  the  practical  reason,  with  its  corolla- 
ries, a  conscience,  a  day  of  judgment,  an  immortality,  and 
a  God,  and  thus  restored  what  he  had  taken  away.  We 
have  all  seen  ''Deo  erexit  Voltaire'''  on  the  temple  at 
Ferney,  where  nobody  worships,  plainly  because  the  age 


An  Advertisement  for  a  New  Religion.       5 

is  beyond  deism,  but  has  not  yet  reached  the  true  reH- 
gion.  Rousseau  is  full  of  pious  sentiment,  and  has  pro- 
nounced the  most  beautiful  eulogium  ever  uttered  on 
Jesus  of  Nazareth,  declaring  that,  while  Socrates  died  as 
a  man,  Jesus  died  as  a  god.  Comte  had  no  god,  but  he 
had  a  Grand  Eire  in  collective  humanity,  and  he  had  a 
priesthood  and  nine  sacraments,  and  enjoined  public  hon- 
ors to  be  paid  to  his  deity  and  to  women,  allowing  no 
liberty  of  conscience  or  of  education  to  any  one.  Hux- 
ley, as  a  member  of  the  School  Board  in  London,  insists 
that  the  Bible  be  introduced  into  every  school,  and  avows 
that  science  does  not  tend  to  make  men  moral,  and  that 
the  Bible,  though  full  of  error,  is  the  only  book  fitted  to 
form  the  character  of  the  young.  Tyndall  is  exceedingly 
indignant  at  those  who  would  charge  him  with  doing  away 
with  religion.  "No  atheistic  reasoning,"  he  says,  "can, 
I  hold,  dislodge  religion  from  the  heart  of  man.  Logic 
cannot  deprive  us  of  life,  and  religion  is  life  to  the  religi- 
ous. As  an  experience  of  consciousness,  it  is  perfectly 
beyond  the  assaults  of  logic."  Herbert  Spencer  has  al- 
lotted a  very  spacious  region  to  God  and  to  religion,  the 
Unknown  and  Unknowable,  and  commends  the  Atheni- 
ans for  erecting  an  altar  to  the  unknown  God. 

It  is  a  very  interesting  circumstance  that  there  are  little 
groups  of  advanced,  truth-loving  men  and  women,  who 
meet  for  conference  on  the  Sundays  in  London,  and  in 
New  York,  Chicago,  and  other  enlightened  cities.  I  have 
at  times  attended  their  meetings.  At  one  of  them,  which 
I  remember  particularly,  we  had  a  very  burning  address 
from  a  man  of  genius,  who  had  started  as  a  Scotch  Cal- 
vinist,  and  run  through  all  modern  forms  of  faith,  and  now 
believes  in  the  Eternities,  of  whom,  or  of  which,  he  dis- 
coursed in  a  glow  surpassing  that  of  the  setting  sun.  He 
had  evidently  taken  his  faith  and  his  language  from 
Thomas  Carlyle,  who  is  one  of  the  prophets  of  our  own, 


6  Conjlicts  of  the  Age. 

and  who  believes  in  Force  as  a  god,  and  gives  him  or  it 
sufficient  omnipotence,  and  ever  flares  up  into  the  "im- 
mensities," and  the  "reahties,"  and  the  "  morahties,"  and 
the  "ideahties,"  as  does  also  our  own  Emerson.  M. 
Renan,  after  showing  that  Jesus  was  tempted,  by  the 
necessity  of  upholding  his  mission,  into  imposture  at  the 
grave  of  Lazarus,  tells  us  in  the  very  strongest  language 
that  he  has  not  cast  aside  religion,  but  believes  in  an 
"  eternal  religion."  In  short,  the  great  men  who  have 
risen  like  mountains  in  our  world  have  all  been  profoundly 
rehgious  ;  thus,  to  name  some  of  them  in  their  historical 
order :  Socrates,  Plato,  Jesus  of  Nazareth,  Paul,  Bacon, 
Descartes,  Newton,  Spinoza,  Leibnitz;  and,  in  this  last 
age,  Herschel,  Faraday,  Mayer,  and  Henry. 

Both  these  truths  have  been  established  by  a  large  in- 
duction, going  as  far  back  as  history  and  archaeology  can 
carry  us.  In  reaching  them  there  have,  in  the  struggles 
for  existence,  been  furious  conflicts  between  Science  and 
Religion,  of  which  Dr.  Draper  and  President  White  have 
been  the  popular  historians — altogether  on  our  side.  There 
have  even  been  internal  feuds  in  each  of  the  hostile  camps, 
both  on  the  religious  and  the  irreligious  (so  charged)  sides. 
This  we  might  expect,  for  the  whole  of  cosmical  action  is 
carried  on  by  undulations  and  by  the  repulsions  as  well 
as  attractions  of  molecules,  and  human  history  has  to 
speak  as  much  of  war  as  of  peace.  Religions  have  had 
their  dissensions,  and  so  have  positivists.  Prof.  Huxley 
has  once  and  again  used  very  irreverent  language  in 
speaking  of  our  great  system-builder,  M.  Comte.  Reply- 
ing to  the  Archbishop  of  York,  he  says : 

"So  far  as  I  am  concerned,  the  most  reverend  prelate 
might  dialectically  hew  M.  Comte  in  pieces,  as  a  modern 
Agag,  and  I  should  not  attempt  to  stay  his  hand.  In  so 
far  as  my  study  of  what  specially  characterizes  the  Posi- 


An  Advertisement  for  a  New  Religion.       7 

tive  Philosophy  has  led  me,  I  find  therein  little  or  nothing 
of  any  scientific  value,  and  a  great  deal  which  is  as  thor- 
oughly antagonistic  to  the  very  essence  of  science  as  any- 
thing in  ultramontane  Catholicism.  In  fact,  M.  Comte's 
philosophy  in  practice  might  be  compendiously  described 
as  Catholicism  viinus  Christianity." 

But  a  far  more  painful  attack  has  been  made  within  the 
last  few  months  on  one  of  our  very  grandest  men,  who 
has  for  years  past  been  acknowledged  to  be  the  greatest 
of  our  logicians — in  fact,  the  special  philosopher  of  his 
age.  Prof.  Jevons  is  so  presumptuous  as  to  speak  thus 
of  Mr.  J.  S.  Mill: 

"  For  about  twenty  years  past  I  have  been  a  more  or 
less  constant  student  of  his  books  ;  during  the  last  four- 
teen years  I  have  been  compelled  by  the  traditional 
requirements  of  the  University  of  London,  to  make  these 
works  at  least  partially  my  text-books  in  lecturing.  Some 
ten  years  of  study  passed  before  I  began  to  detect  their 
fundamental  unsoundness.  ...  I  will  no  longer  consent 
to  live  silently  under  the  incubus  of  bad  logic  and  bad 
philosophy  which  Mill's  works  have  laid  upon  us.  .  .  . 
If  to  all  his  other  qualities  had  been  happily  added  logical 
accurateness,  his  writings  would  indeed  have  been  a  source 
of  light  for  generations  to  come.  But  in  one  way  or  other 
Mill's  intellect  was  wrecked.  The  cause  of  injury  may 
have  been  the  ruthless  training  which  his  father  imposed 
upon  him  in  tender  years ;  it  may  have  been  Mill's 
own  life-long  attempt  to  reconcile  a  false  empirical 
philosophy  with  conflicting  truth.  But,  however  it  arose. 
Mill's  mind  was  essentially  illogical.  ...  I  undertake 
to  show  that  there  is  hardly  one  of  his  more  important 
and  peculiar  doctrines  which  he  has  not  himself  amply 
refuted." 


8  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

I  might  quote  pages  of  similar  opprobrious  language. 
There  may  be  some  truth  in  it  as  applied  to  Mill's  formal 
logic,  in  which  he  has  never  been  regarded  as  an  adept. 
But  he  makes  an  equally  strong  attack  on  his  inductive 
logic,  which  has  commonly  been  regarded  as  perfect.  He 
describes  "  Mill's  mind  as  essentially  illogical ;  "  he  speaks 
of  "the  perversity  of  his  intellect;"  declares  that  "the 
philosophy  of  the  Mills,  both  father  and  son,  is  a  false 
one  ;  "  and  says  of  a  certain  paragraph  that  "  it  is  likely 
to  produce  intellectual  vertigo  in  the  steadiest  thinker." 
He  disparages  Mill's  famous  canons  of  induction,  and 
afhrms  that  he  confounds  both  causation  and  induction. 
But  all  this  dogmatism  will  not  prevent  Mr.  Mill  from 
surviving.  Men  will  soon  discover  that  Jevons'  attempt 
to  make  logic  mathematical  is  an  entire  failure.  It  is  not 
a  proper  interpretation  of  the  judgment  "man  dies,"  to 
put  it  in  the  form  "  man  =  some  dying  creatures."  It  is 
clear  to  me  that,  in  the  struggle  for  existence,  Mill  will 
long  outlive  Jevons. 

As  man  must  have  a  religion,  and  the  old  religions  are 
sick,  dying,  or  dead,  so  we  must  have  a  new-born  religion. 
We  cannot  hasten  the  orderly  but  slow  processes  of  nature. 
A  premature  birth  must  produce  a  weakly  child.  Emerson 
says  truly,  in  a  late  number  of  the  North  Auierican  Re- 
view, "  It  does  not  yet  appear  what  forms  the  religious  feel- 
ing will  take."  So  we  are  not  able  to  describe  fully  what 
the  new  religion  already  in  the  womb  is  to  be.  But  we 
can  confidently  affirm  that  it  must  obey  certain  condi- 
tions, and  can  specify  some  of  the  negative  ones. 

I.  It  cannot  have  a  God  living  and  personal.  This 
would  be  pure,  or  rather  very  impure,  anthropomorphism. 
In  the  philosophy  of  Plato,  and  in  the  Old  and  New  Tes- 
taments, and  the  popular  apprehension,  man  is  supposed 
to  be  formed  after  the  image  of  God  ;  but  the  truth  is, 
man  has  formed  his  god  after  his  own  image,  quite  as 


An  Advertisement  for  a  New  Religion.       9 

much  so  as  when  the  old  idolaters  cut  down  a  tree  and 
made  a  man-god  figure  out  of  it.  The  old  Greek  philos- 
opher Xenophanes  satirically  remarked  that  the  Thracians 
gave  blue  eyes  and  the  Ethiopians  snub  noses  to  their 
gods  ;  so  the  Christians  make  their  god  hate  what  they 
hate,  and  denounce  as  sin  all  that  is  too  liberal  for  them, 
and  send  all  to  hell  who  do  not  beheve  as  they  do.  There 
can  be  no  objections  with  Spencer  to  call  the  Unknown 
by  the  name  of  God,  but  then  he  must  not  be  regarded 
as  having  properties  that  can  be  named,  or  even  thought 
of, — the  lofty  Neoplatonists  of  Alexandria  were  right  in 
placing  their  god  so  high  and  ethereal  that  no  predication 
can  be  made  regarding  him. 

2.  It  cannot  insist  on  a  personal  immortality  to  the 
soul.  This  would  be  bringing  an  Egyptian  mummy  of 
the  days  of  the  Pharaohs  into  a  modern  drawing-room. 
True,  every  object  known  is  not  only  immortal,  but 
eternal,  as  the  doctrine  of  the  conservation  of  force  shows  ; 
and  has  existed  in  all  past  time,  and  shall  exist  forever — 
if  there  be  a  forever.  But  the  individual  soul  is  the  pro- 
duct of  the  brain,  and,  when  the  brain  is  decomposed, 
the  soul  must  dissolve  with  it  into  its  material  elements  ; 
and  is  really  so  insignificant  that  it  is  not  transmuted  into 
any  other  force.  I  am  not  aware  that  the  soul  of  Shake- 
speare, or  of  Newton,  when  they  died,  added  any  weigh- 
able  powers  to  the  dust  to  which  they  returned. 

3.  There  must  be  no  terrors  drawn  from  a  day  of  judg- 
ment. These  may  frighten  children,  and  men  and  women 
weak  as  children,  but  highly  developed  men  are  beyond 
them,  and  look  down  with  pity,  not  unmixed  with  con- 
tempt, on  those  who  are  swayed  by  them.  True,  there 
is  a  judgment  set  up  in  our  world — one  which  pronounces 
terrible  sentences  that  cannot  be  reversed.  It  is  the 
struggle  for  existence,  in  which  those  not  suited  to  the 
environment — the  weak,  the  deaf,  the  blind,  the  decrepit, 


lo  Conjiicts  of  the  Age. 

the  idiots,  the  negroes,  the  Indians — as  being  useless, 
must  perish  ;  and  the  strong,  the  healthy,  the  bold,  the 
philosophers,  especially  evolutionists,  will  survive  and 
advance  the  civilization  of  the  world. 

4.  There  can  be  no  ghostly  sanctions  or  motives  derived 
from  a  supernatural  power,  or  a  world  to  come.  The 
thinking  portion  of  mankind  have  never  been  much 
swayed  by  considerations  drawn  from  these  regions  above 
or  below  our  ken.  Any  attempt  to  enforce  them  in  this 
advanced  age  will  be  resisted  by  every  man  of  sense  and 
independence. 

5.  Everything  beyond  what  can  be  seen  must  be  repre- 
sented as  unknown  and  unknowable.  The  Hebrews  were 
right  in  saying  that  clouds  and  darkness  cover  the  face  of 
God's  throne,  and  furnish  a  mystery  fitted  to  awe  us;  and 
in  that  region,  as  in  the  heathen  groves,  religion  may  be 
allowed  to  dwell. 

It  is  vastly  more  difficult,  beforehand,  to  tell  positively 
what  the  new  religion  is  to  be.  Still  the  prophets  of  our 
own,  and  the  priests  who  have  charge  of  it,  have  given  us 
certain  characteristics.  Mr.  Mill  has  given  us  a  description 
of  the  worship  set  up  by  Comte,  though  he  is  not  pre- 
pared to  adopt  it :  "  Private  adoration  is  to  be  addressed 
to  collective  Humanity  in  the  persons  of  worthy  individual 
representatives,  who  may  be  either  living  or  dead,  but 
must  in  all  cases  be  women  ;  for  women,  being  the  sexe 
aimant,  represent  the  best  attribute  of  humanity  that 
ought  to  regulate  all  human  life,  nor  can  humanity  pos- 
sibly be  represented  in  any  form  but  of  a  woman.  The 
objects  of  private  adoration  are  the  mother,  the  wife,  the 
daughter,  representing  severally  the  past,  the  present,  and 
the  future,  and  calling  into  active  exercise  the  three  social 
sentiments — veneration,  attachment,  and  kindness.  We 
are  to  regard  them,  whether  dead  or  alive,  as  our  guar- 
dian angels,  les  vraies  anges  gardieiis.      If  the  last  have 


An  Advertisement  for  a  New  Religion,      ii 

never  existed,  or  if  in  the  particular  case  any  of  the  three 
types  is  too  faulty  for  the  office  assigned  it,  their  place  may 
be  supplied  by  some  other  type  of  womanly  excellence, 
even  by  one  merely  historical."  All  who  have  benefited 
the  race  are  to  be  the  Dii  Minores  of  this  theology  :  and 
days  might  be  set  apart  to  Democritus  and  his  atoms 
which  make  the  world  ;  to  Lucretius,  who  expelled  all  su- 
perstitious fears  ;  and  Hobbes,  who  derived  all  our  ideas 
from  sensation  ;  not  omitting  Comte  himself,  who  rid  us 
of  first  and  final  cause.  I  do  fear,  however,  that  this 
religion  will  not  survive  in  the  struggle  for  existence. 
Some  of  Comte's  followers  speak  of  it  as  an  evidence  of 
his  lunacy. 

But  there  must,  I  suppose,  be  a  worship  of  some  kind, 
were  it  only  to  accommodate  the  religion  to  human  nature, 
which  wishes  to  have  an  outlet  to,  and  an  expression  of, 
its  feelings.  But  this  worship,  as  Huxley  has  profoundly 
remarked,  must  be  "  chiefly  of  the  silent  sort."  Worship 
has,  in  fact,  never  had  much  influence  on  the  life  of  the 
worshipper.  Borrow  tells  of  the  gypsy  mother  who  said  to 
her  child,  "You  may  go  and  steal,  nowthatyou  have  said 
your  prayers."  Religious  emotion  is  an  ebullition  which 
wastes  the  energy  without  yielding  much  good.  But  this 
worship  of  the  '*  silent  sort"  may  have  a  quiet  influence 
without  anybody  being  able  to  notice  it. 

With  Humanity  as  its  god,  the  religion  must  have  an 
immortality,  after  which  all  are  striving.  Mr.  Harrison, 
the  most  spirit-stirring  of  our  later  prophets,  has  been 
lately  developed  to  tell  us  what  it  is  to  be.  It  is  not  to  be 
a  personal  immortality,  but  it  is  to  be  a  continued  life  in 
a  man's  works.  Thus  Homer  lives  in  the  Iliad.  In  like 
manner  the  orator  lives  in  the  words  he  has  uttered  ;  and 
the  actor  in  the  parts  he  has  played  ;  and  the  singer  in  the 
tunes  he  has  sung  ;  and  the  trumpeter  in  the  noise  he  has 
made  ;  and  the  ploughman  in  the  earth  he  has  turned  up  ; 


12  Conjiicts  of  the  Age. 

and  the  fisherman  in  the  fish  he  has  caught ;  and  the 
butcher  in  the  cattle  he  has  killed  ;  and  Mr.  Harrison  in  the 
posthumous  influence-theory  in  the  "  Symposium"  of  the 
NineteentJi  Century.  This  leads  me  to  remark  how  happy 
a  thing-  it  is  that  we  have  such  organs  as  the  Fortnightly, 
the  Contemporary  Review,  and  the  NineteentJi  Century  to 
give  the  prophets  of  the  new  religion  an  opportunity  of 
being  heard  by  respectable  exemplary  people.  I  find  that 
the  old  lady,  the  Quarterly ,  always  "  so  dastardly,"  com- 
plains of  this.  We  are  the  more  dependent  on  these  two 
young  organs  since  the  old  fires  of  the  Westminster  Re- 
viezv  have  burned  themselves  out,  and  left,  like  the  volca- 
noes in  the  moon,  only  extinct  craters  ;  and  that  once 
powerful  organ  is  in  the  position  of  a  man  who  has  out- 
lived his  faculties. 

Along  with  this  belief  there  might  hQ  fetes  and  festivals 
to  rival  the  grand  Catholic  ceremonies.  There  would  be 
some  kind  of  Sabbath,  but  removed  as  far  as  possible  from 
the  Jewish  and  the  Puritan  ;  and  to  distinguish  it  it  might 
be  called  Sunday,  that  is  the  sun's  day,  and  we  might 
have  it  like  the  French  Revolutionists,  once  in  ten  days, 
instead  of  seven.  On  these  occasions  there  would  be 
lectures  of  the  true  American  type,  developing  the  theory 
of  development,  evolving  man  from  the  brute,  and  show- 
ing that  he  may  rise  higher  than  he  has  ever  yet  done, 
though  it  is  to  be  hoped  never  incapable  of  marriage.  There 
might  be  hymns  in  honor  of  the  great  mother,  Nature, 
more  worthy  to  be  revered  than  the  Virgin.  With  this 
there  might  be  idols  representing  in  symbol  the  great 
world-powers,  such  as  Evolution,  Persistence  of  Force, 
Heredity,  Panzoism,  and  Physiological  Units.  Around 
the  places  of  worship  there  might  be  groves  like  those 
dedicated  in  old  time  to  Baal,  the  powerful  fire-god.  There 
would  be  assemblies  of  males  and  females  with  Bacchantic 
dances,  where  time  would  be  delightfully  spent,  and  the 


An  Advertisement  for  a  New  Religion.      13 

remembrance  of  which  would  be  pleasant — vastly  more  so 
than  the  dreary  hours  spent  in  our  preaching  and  praying 
conventicles.  It  will  take  time  to  create  the  fitting  senti- 
ment ;  but  time  is  an  essential  condition  of  all  natural 
evolution,  and  we  can  give  the  new  religion  ten  thousand 
years  to  develop.  In  the  struggle  for  existence  all  other 
religions  would  disappear  and  this  alone  remain,  till  it  gives 
birth  to  something  still  higher  :  not  more  heavenly — that 
is,  ideal ;  but  more  earthly — that  is,  real  and  practical. 

But  at  this  point  we  are  met  by  a  difficulty  which  we 
must  meet  if  we  can.  Man,  it  is  acknowledged,  has  reli- 
gious instincts  which  cannot  be  destroyed,  even  in  the 
fiery  struggles  for  existence.  Whence  come  they  ?  How 
is  it  that  they  cannot  be  eradicated  ?  We  evolutionists 
tell  religious  men  (so-called)  that  they  may  give  up  their 
fears,  for  religion  has  its  seat  so  deep  in  the  soul  that  it 
cannot  be  dislodged.  But  our  prophets  assure  us  that  the 
human  soul  is  developed  from  the  higher  animals,  and 
these  from  the  lower,  and  that  there  is  a  physical  basis  un- 
derneath the  whole.  How  or  when  have  these  indestructi- 
ble instincts  come  in  ?  If  they  have  come  in  from  without, 
we  have  here  a  very  marked  phenomenon  of  which  the 
evolution  hypotheses  can  make  nothing,  and  which,  our 
pietists  will  say,  implies  a  supernatural  power.  But,  if  we 
are  to  bring  in  one  thing  independent  of  development, 
why  not  more  ?  Why  not  free-will,  with  Dr.  Carpenter  ? 
Why  not  reason  and  intelligence,  with  the  metaphysicians 
— until  we  overwhelm  the  whole  glorious  theory,  evidently 
seen  to  be  insufficient  ?  And  if,  on  the  other  hand,  it  be 
merely  a  natural  product  then  it  should  disappear  in  the 
struggle  for  existence  like  other  superstitions.  Already 
there  are  signs  of  its  beginning  to  vanish  in  this  nineteenth 
century  of  the  present  religion,  and  it  must  evidently  all 
be  gone  before  the  nineteen-hundredth  century.  I  fear 
that  this  contradiction  must  for  the  present  be  allowed  to 


14  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

remain  with  the  antinomies  of  Kant  which  have  under- 
mined all  rational  cosmology.  But  then  Hegel  has  shown 
that  all  truth  is  contradictory,  and  there  will  cast  up  a 
synthesis  to  bridge  over  the  gap  in  the  analysis. 

This  new  religion  must  come.  The  conditions  are  ready. 
Just  as  life  appeared  when  inanimate  matter  was  ready 
for  it,  and  sensation  came  and  consciousness  came  when 
the  nerves  were  woven,  and  intelligence  came  when  the 
brain  was  fashioned  for  it;  and  as  Abraham  went  forth, 
not  knowing  whither  he  went,  to  publish  the  unity  of 
God  ;  and  the  son  of  the  carpenter,  at  Nazareth,  came  to 
preach  altruism  under  the  name  of  love  ;  and  as  Luther 
started  up,  like  the  crowing  of  the  cock  which  sounded 
in  the  ears  of  Peter,  to  bring  the  Church  to  see  its  errors 
— so  the  new  faith  has  now  to  come  forth,  as  the  sun  does 
at  its  appointed  time.  The  world  is  ready  to  receive  it ; 
and  as  paganism  gave  way  before  Christianity,  and  the 
superstitions  of  Romanism  fled  before  the  reading  of  the 
Bible,  and  as  rationalism  has  undermined  evangelism, 
with  its  faith  in  blood,  so  a  new  priest  must  come  with 
his  rod  to  swallow  all  the  rods  of  the  magicians.  It  must 
all  come  by  development.  A  virgin  must  once  more 
bring  forth  a  child  ;  and,  that  this  can  be  done,  is  illus- 
trated by  the  lately  established  doctrine  of  partheno-gen- 
esis.  A  variety  will  become  settled  into  an  unchangeable 
species,  and  will  continue  for  ages,  till  it  is  superseded 
by  something  else,  fitted  to  fight  under  the  ncAv  condi- 
tions. "  It  doth  not  yet  appear  what  we  shall  be." 
There  have  been  anticipations,  however,  and  the  leapings 
of  the  babe  in  the  womb.  But  there  must  be  a  time 
longer  of  struggle  for  existence,  till  the  strongest  assert 
its  might  (which  of  course  is  right) — as  we  see  among 
cattle  in  the  field,  the  stronger  cow  fighting  till  she  gets 
her  pre-eminence  allowed.  Rational  theology  has  done 
good  by  its  assaults  on  Scripture  ;  but  then  it  professed 


All  Adve7'tisc7nent  fo7'  a  New  Religioit.      15 

to  accept  so  much  of  Scripture  as  is  rational — as  if  any  of 
it  were  rational.  Pure  deism  has  always  been  felt  to  be 
chill  as  death,  and  now  its  supposed  proofs,  and  indeed 
all  rational  theology,  have  been  undermined  by  Hume, 
Kant,  and  Mill.  Unitarianism  is  dead,  and  lying  in  state 
in  order  to  burial,  and  of  the  dead  I  desire  to  speak  nil 
nisi  bonum,  especially  as  Unitarianism  has  no  longer  any 
power  over  young  men,  while  it  has  helped  to  develop 
the  present  crisis.  Mormonism,  the  only  new  religion 
which  has  sprung  up  in  our  rather  barren  age,  is  very 
coarse  and  gross,  and  is  a  warning  to  us  of  what  an  un- 
scientific faith  may  become.  I  fear  that  the  butterfly, 
when  it  appears,  may  have  somewhat  of  the  slime  of  the 
grub  from  which  it  has  been  developed.  All  this  shows 
the  greater  need  of  a  new  faith  founded  on  the  latest  nat- 
ural knowledge. 

There  is  an  urgent  need  for  a  new  belief  to  come,  and 
that  speedily.  If  not  soon  forthcoming,  there  is  a  risk 
that  our  young  folks  rush  into  forbidden  ground.  We 
are  at  present  in  a  transition  state,  which  is  a  critical 
state;  we  are  in  danger  of  being  crushed  in  a  collision 
between  two  trains,  one  of  which  has  come  upon  the  other 
before  it  has  started.  Our  sons  claim  that  in  prosecuting 
their  rights  they  are  just  as  much  entitled  to  advance  be- 
yond their  fathers  as  their  fathers  did  beyond  their  sires. 
Encouraged,  as  they  allege,  by  our  example,  they  are 
waxing  bold,  not  to  say  petulant.  They  laugh  at  the 
worship  instituted  by  Comte,  and  will  not  attend  our 
select  conferences.  They  have  no  great  awe,  and  no 
dread  whatever  in  regard  to  the  unknown  of  Spencer ;  if 
it  can  never  be  known,  why  should  they  either  revere  or 
fear  it  ?  Nay,  they  maintain  philosophically  that  i\\Q  pJie- 
nomenon  does  not  logically  imply  a  nournenon,  and  so  they 
are  carried  back  to  the  old  Hume  positions  of  there  being 
nothing  but  appearances  without  a  thing  appearing,  and 


1 6  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

affirm  that  the  nownenon  is  a  remainder  of  an  old,  super- 
stitious philosophy,  brought  in  awkwardly  by  Kant,  and 
sustained  by  Hamilton,  Mansel,  and  Spencer,  to  save  them 
from  blank  skepticism,  and  now  ready  to  disappear  like 
mist  before  the  light  of  the  rising  day.  They  seem  to  be 
satisfied  with  the  appearances,  and  to  care  nothing  about 
the  unknown  thing.  Darwin  is  religious  enough  to  call 
in  three  or  four  germs  created  by  God  ;  but  Tyndall  in- 
sists that  anthropomorphism,  which  is  to  be  so  avoided, 
"  is  as  firmly  associated  with  the  creation  of  a  few  forms 
as  of  a  multitude  ;  "  and  Huxley  has  started  a  pregnant 
hypothesis  of  a  supposed  early  stage  of  the  star-dust,  when 
it  produced  germs  which  it  cannot  now  do.  Huxley  and 
Tyndall  are  falling  behind  the  age  which  they  led  for  a 
time,  and  resolutely  oppose  spontaneous  generation  ;  but 
Bastian  comes  after,  and  gets  bacteria  out  of  liquid  sub- 
stances in  which  all  the  germs  have  been  killed  by  heat. 
Men  like  Sir  John  Herschel  used  to  point  to  the  human 
eye  as  giving  evidence  in  its  numerous  adaptations  of  de- 
sign ;  but  the  great  physicist  of  our  day,  Helmholtz,  tells 
us  that,  if  an  optician  brought  him  so  blundering  an  in- 
strument as  the  eye,  he  would  return  it  to  him.  Tyndall 
thinks  he  can  explain  even  mental  action  by  matter,  and, 
in  his  sweeping  lecture  at  Birmingham,  would  persuade 
us  that  we  are  responsible  in  the  same  sense  as  the  dog  ; 
that  a  criminal  is  absolutely  necessitated  to  act  as  he 
does,  but  that  we  are  necessitated  to  punish  him  to  pre- 
vent the  recurrence  of  the  offence,  as  we  strike  a  dog  to 
prevent  him  from  steahng  again.  There  may  be  some 
truth  in  all  this,  but  it  is  dangerous  to  publish  it,  as  it  may 
tempt  young  men  to  get  as  many  of  the  sweets  of  the  bee 
as  they  can,  if  only  they  can  keep  from  being  exposed  to 
its  sting. 

Aristotle  maintained  that  "Nature  abhors  a  vacuum." 
He  was  wrong  in  applying  this  to  the  rise  of  water  in  a 


An  Advertisement  for  a  Nczv  Religion.     1 7 

tube,  as  was  shown  by  Torricelli,  but  he  uttered  a  pro- 
found truth  notwithstanding.  The  heart  must  have  some- 
thing to  chng  to  beyond  a  negation,  of  which  no  one  can 
say  whether  it  has  or  has  not  a  meaning.  If  what  is  un- 
known could  be  known,  there  might  be  some  hope  and 
activity;  but  it  is  unknowable,  and  so  no  human  interest 
can  attach  to  it.  My  adopted  daughter  when  in  London 
went  to  a  Wesleyan  meeting  one  part  of  the  day,  and  to 
a  Sunday  lecture,  by  Huxley,  on  another  part;  and, 
strange  as  it  may  sound,  she  preferred  the  sincere  shout- 
ing, the  amens  and  groans  of  the  Methodists  to  the  wor- 
ship of  "  the  silent  sort,"  in  which  there  seemed  to  be  no 
heart  or  adoration — except  in  the  organ.  A  bright  young 
lady,  after  listening  for  six  weeks  to  lectures  on  "  Human- 
ity," declared  that  she  would  rather  worship  the  Virgin, 
who  seemed  to  have  a  loving  heart,  and  whom  she  iden- 
tified with  the  statues  of  her  in  Italy.  Some  of  my  lady 
friends  have  told  me  that  when  crossed  in  love  they  would 
prefer  a  nunnery  to  an  Owen  phalanstery  or  a  communist 
settlement  at  Oneida.  But  our  greatest  anxiety  is  about 
the  young  men,  our  sons,  who,  of  course,  will  be  brought 
up  without  a  Bible,  and  without  prayer,  public  or  pri- 
vate, and  whose  reading  will  be  in  physiology  male  and 
female,  and  in  books  we  are  not  able  to  keep  from  them 
(this  is  said  by  travellers  to  be  the  case  with  the  young 
ladies  in  Russia)  ;  and  who  go  to  theatres,  which  we  freely 
allow,  as  they  are  schools  of  virtue,  and  see  the  sort  of 
company  in  the  gallery  and  the  boxes,  and  go  home  with 
some  of  them  simply  to  know  more  of  them.  We  hon- 
estly tell  them  to  be  honest,  and  obliging,  and  chaste — 
always  according  to  our  ideas,  which  are  surely  liberal 
enough.  But  they  puzzle  us  with  questions  which  we 
have  difficulty  enough  in  answering  satisfactorily  to  them 
in  their  present  unsettled  temper.  If  Comte  loved  ador- 
ingly another  woman  than  his  wife,  "why,"  they  say, 
2 


1 8  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

"  may  not  we  do  the  same  ?  If  Mr.  Mill  constantly  asso- 
ciated in  the  tenderest  manner  with  the  druggist's  wife, 
in  the  absence  of  her  husband,  why  may  not  we  have  the 
like  privilege  ? "  They  remind  us  that  these  illustrious 
men  have  been  teaching  us  that  there  must  be  a  new  rela- 
tion between  the  sexes  established,  and  have  left  it  very 
doubtful  what  it  should  be,  and  our  youths  think  they 
may  experiment  on  the  subject.  They  remind  us  that 
Bradlaugh  and  his  lady  associate  have  been  quoting  the 
authority  of  Mr.  Mill  for  their  books  condemned  by  the 
law  courts.  They  speak  doubtingly  of  the  relation  of  our 
philosophic  female  novelist  and  Mr.  Lewes,  whose  wife  is 
still  living.  We  used  to  claim  that  we  freethinkers  of  this 
age  were  moral  compared  with  the  infidels  of  the  days  of 
Tom  Paine  ;  I  fear  that  we  can  no  longer  make  this  boast. 
It  is  alleged  that  in  circles  affected  with  our  views  directly, 
and  more  frequently  indirectly,  there  is  a  loose  code  which 
allows  those  who  yield  to  animal  affection  to  justify  them- 
selves by  an  appeal  to  the  now  established  doctrine  of 
human  parentage  and  descent — as,  in  the  declining  days 
of  Rome,  licentious  men  and  women  fortified  themselves 
by  the  philosophy  of  Epicurus  ;  and  in  the  days  of  Louis 
XV.  of  France,  by  the  science  and  example  of  the  ency- 
clopedists. The  origin  of  man  certainly  does  not  furnish 
us  with  any  arguments  for  monogamy  or  against  tempo- 
rary concubinage,  our  ancestors  among  the  monkeys 
knowing  no  restrictions  in  these  matters. 

We  do  tell  these  youths  io  be  moral.  But  they  hint 
that  morality,  .in  the  vulgar  sense,  has  been  undermined. 
We  do  not  address  to  them  any  appeals  drawn  from  the 
divine  existence  and  a  judgment-day;  if  we  did  so,  they 
would  laugh  in  our  faces.  Some  of  them  are  bold  enough 
to  tell  us  that,  the  sanction  being  gone,  the  law  has  gone 
with  it,  or,  at  least,  is  not  to  be  considered  as  unbending, 
but  may  fit  itself  to  conditions  and  environments.    We  do 


An  Advertisement  for  a  New  Religion.     19 

at  times  appeal  to  the  conscience.  But  they  remind  us 
that  Prof.  Bain  and  Herbert  Spencer  have  shown  us  that 
the  conscience  is  simply  the  product  of  circumstances, 
founded  on  man's  capacity  for  pleasure  and  pain  ;  and 
the  verified  hypothesis  of  the  evolutionist  is,  that  it  has 
been  built  up,  in  ten  millions  of  years,  from  the  primitive 
sensations  of  pleasure  and  pain  felt  by  our  ascidian  fore- 
fathers. Having  examined  the  title,  and  exposed  its 
validity,  they  deny  the  right  of  this  pretended  despot  to 
rule  over  us.  Tyndall  acknowledges  that  there  is  a  reli- 
gious instinct ;  but  then  he  has  also  detected  its  origin 
among  material  atoms,  and  our  youth  doubt  whether  it 
can  claim  any  authority. 

We  speak  of  the  beauty  of  "  altruism  " — so  much  more 
significant  a  phrase  than  "love,"  which  the  Bible  uses. 
Our  youths  answer,  first  self  and  then  another,  and  ask, 
now  that  conscience  is  gone,  what  claim  altruism  has  on 
them.  "Let  the  another,"  each  says,  "look  after  him- 
self, and  I  will  look  after  myself,  and  oblige  him  when  it 
suits  me."  But  we  urge  upon  them  that  it  is  for  their 
interest  to  be  good,  and  to  do  good.  They  answer  that 
this  is  not  so  very  obvious,  and  that  they  are  so  interested 
in  the  present  pursuit,  and  so  fascinated  with  an  engaging 
affection,  that  they  are  willing  to  risk  all  earthly  conse- 
quences, and  they  remind  us  that  we  need  not  fear  any 
consequences  in  the  world  to  come.  All  this  can  no  doubt 
be  answered,  but  not  very  satisfactorily,  I  fear,  till  we 
get  the  new  "kingdom;"  not,  indeed,  of  "God,"  or 
"heaven,"  but  of  the  "earth,"  in  the  highly  developed 
state  which  it  has  reached  in  this  quaternary  era  of  its 
history.  But,  when  the  new  religion  comes,  it  will  collect 
around  it  a  faith  and  attractive  associations  ;  and  it  will 
generate  an  artistic  worship  full  of  glow  ;  and  the  hearts 
of  our  young  men  and  women  will  be  drawn  toward  it, 
and  we  shall  have  a  joyous  religion,  with  a  free  and  gen- 


20  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

erous  morality,  rejecting  all  asceticism,  and  attracting  by 
its  own  charms. 

Multitudes  are  looking  and  longing  for  the  new  religion, 
and  the  longing  will  bring  it — ^just  as  was  shown  by  the 
great   naturalist,    Lamarck,    the    longing    of   the    animal 
brought  it  fins  to  swim  in  the  sea,  and  wings  to  fly  in  the 
heavens.     Some,  I  know,  in  this  state  of  transition,  are 
intensely  and  overwhelmingly  anxious.     They  have  lost 
their    old    faith,    and   the    new   one    has    not   yet    come. 
Strauss,  in  some  of  his  earhest  editions,  used  to  say  that 
it  was  not  the  truth,  but  the  belief,  that  is  powerful  as  a 
motive  ;  not  the  resurrection  of  Christ,  but  the  belief  in 
it.     But,  it  being  now  known  that  there  is  no  rehgious 
truth,  and  that  there  has  been  no  resurrection,  the  faith 
has  died  for  want  of  its  needful  nourishment.  The  heart  is 
empty,  and  aching  and  crying  for  food— as  the  man  dying 
of  hunger  does  ;  and  for  water— as  the  man  dying  of  thirst 
does.     There  are,  to  my  knowledge,  terrible  conflicts  in 
the  souls  of  some  of  our  young  men.     There  are  distract- 
ing fears,  also,  in  the  bosoms  of  some  of  our  young  women 
vv^ho  love  their  brothers  and  their  lovers,  and  would  like 
to  follow  them,  but  are  afraid  to  do  so,  and  have  to  use 
like  language  with  the  wife  of  James  Mill,  when  she  said 
of  her  husband  in  his  later  life,  "  He  says  things  that 
frighten  me."     Our  youths  remember  the  grave  counsels 
of  their  fathers  ever  appealing  to  heaven,  and  the  prayers 
of  their  mothers  committing  them  with  uplifted  hands  to 
God.     They  cannot  forget  that  they  used  themselves  to 
pray,  and  found  comfort  under  bereavement  when  they 
could  thus  unbosom  themselves,  in  the  belief  that  there 
was  an  eye  watching  over  them  and  a  heart  pitying  them. 
They  have  a  tender  memory  of  the  parting  with  fathers 
and  mothers  and  sisters,  who  assured  those  left  behind 
that  they  were  going  to  heaven,  and  wished  those  they 
loved  to  follow  them— all  of  which  they  are  now  obhged 


An  Advertisement  for  a  New  Religion.     21 

to  regard  as  a  delusion.  Some  of  us  have  to  look  back 
on  these  days  with  a  sigh.  We  have  recorded  instances 
of  such  feeling  in  Joufifroy,  when  his  philosophy  deprived 
him  of  his  religion  ;  and  in  Greg,  when  deism  took  away 
the  faith  of  his  childhood. 

But,  as  honest  men,  we  must  follow  the  truth— the  dif- 
ficulty being  to  know  which  path  she  has  taken,  the  dark- 
ness being  so  dense.     We  cannot  return  to  the  simple 
faith  which  we  have  left  far  behind— the  water  cannot  re- 
turn and  run   up  the  hill  down  which   it  has  descended. 
In  the  struggle  feelings,  more  bitter  than  tears,  have  been 
wrung  from  the  heart.     The   cry  is  for  the  touch  of  a 
vanished  hand,  which  has  been  cut  off  and  committed  to 
the  earth,  from  which  it  will  never  rise  again.     There  is 
a  shriek  heard  more  piercing  than  that  which  comes  from 
a  house  on  fire  with  inmates  locked  in,  than  that  which 
comes  from  a  ship  on  fire  or  a  lunatic  asylum  in  flames. 
It  would  reach  the  ear  of  God,  were  there  a  god  with  ears 
to  hear,  or  a  heart  to  feel  for  it.     I  have  been  cursed  by  a 
young  man,  who  has  fallen  into  vice,  and  who  charges  me 
with  leading  him  from  the  faith  in  a  God  and  Mediator,  in 
which  his  mother  had  reared  him,  without  giving  him 
anything  else  in  its  place,  and  who  says  he  is  disposed  to 
believe  in  God — which  is  as  certain  as  that  every  effect 
has  a  cause — but  does  not  now  know  the  way  in  which  to 
approach  him.    The  voice  cries  in  broken  accents,  "  They 
have  taken  away  my  God,  and  my  faidi   and  my  hope, 
and  I  know  not  where  to  find  them  !  "    It  is  certain  that 
there  is  no  God  to  answer  the  complaint,  but  I  have  faith 
in  the  development  which  has  done  so  much  in  the  past, 
and  will  do  more  in  the  future,  that  it  will  fill  the  void  it 
has  created.     "The  children  have  come  to  the  birth," 
and  what  we  need  is  one  to  deliver  them  ;  and  I  advertise 
for  such  from  among  our  scientific  doctors  all  over  the 
world. 


II. 

CONFESSION  OF  AN  AGNOSTIC. 

BY   AN   AGNOSTIC. 

Upward  of  a  year  has  elapsed  since  my  old  master,  "  An 
Evolutionist,"  advertised  in  TJie  North  American  Review 
(July,  1878)  for  a  "  new  religion."  I  understand  that  very 
few  of  the  multitudes,  young  and  old,  Avho  are  dissatisfied 
with  all  existing  religions,  have  answered  that  application, 
and  these  have  proposed  schemes  which  my  friend  regards 
as  absurd  and  fit  only  to  be  laughed  at.  A  Bostonian,  a 
leading  member  of  one  of  the  literary  clubs  of  the  capital  of 
New  England,  advocates  rationalism,  being  an  advanced 
Unitarianism,  which  takes  only  so  much  of  the  Bible  as 
commends  itself  to  reason,  and  shuts  its  eyes  to  the  facts 
that  this  compromise  was  tried  from  the  middle  of  last 
century  to  the  middle  of  this  ;  that  it  was  all  along  felt  to 
be  cold  as  an  icicle,  failing  to  draw  the  heart  of  any  man  or 
woman  or  child  to  it  ;  and  that  its  favorite  rationalistic 
tenets  about  God  and  immortality  have  melted  away  into 
an  offensive  yellow  foam  under  the  scorching  criticisms 
of  Kant  and  Mill.  A  smart  young  Unitarian  preacher 
settles  the  whole  question  by  leaving  out  of  the  Scrip- 
tures all  that  is  supernatural  and  all  that  relates  to  a 
bloody  sacrifice,  regeneration,  and  eternal  perdition,  but 
keeping  the  poetry  which  he  admires,  and  adding  some 
maxims  from  Buddha  taught  in  the  school  of  univer- 
sal religion  at  Harvard  ;  and  he  tries  to  draw  audiences 
by  discussing  all  the  questions  of  the  day  on  these  liberal 


Confession  of  an  Agnostic.  23 

principles.    A  higher  man,  trained  in  the  school  of  Hegel, 
regards  the  Scriptures  as  merely  the  manifestation  of  the 
religious  feelings  of  the  writers  and  of  their  age,  but  con- 
taining  some    unconscious    presages    of   the    religion    to 
comerand  has  constructed  an  a  priori  religion  with  a 
Trinity  and  a  reconcihation   of  all    contradictions  by  a 
Logos.      Unfortunately,  Hegelianism  has  run  its  course 
in  Germany  ;  and  in  this  country   youths  wonder  at  it, 
but  do  not  accept  it.     Some  Western  men  have  proposed 
a  worship  without  any  beliefs,  like  that  of  M.  Comte,  and 
would  set  up  shows  with  music  and  processions,  and  the 
adoration   of  heroes  such   as   Buddha,  and  Jesus  Christ, 
and  Mohammed,  and  Oliver  Cromwell,  and  Voltaire,  and 
George  Washington,  and  Emerson— as  soon  as  he  is  re- 
moved to  the  land  of  shades.      My  friend  sees  that  such 
a  mystic  faith  will  be  scorned  by  the  hardy  farmers  and 
miners  of  the  West,  though  it  might  be  agreeable  enough 
to  some  of  their  wives  who  feel  that  they  must  have  a 
worship.     My  advertising  patron  is  thus  left,  as   I  confi- 
dently anticipated,  without  a  religion. 

I  belong  to  a  younger  and  a  more  advanced  genera- 
tion ;  and^^I  am  entitled  to  go  beyond  my  master,  even 
as  he  went  beyond  his  Unitarian  teachers.  Beliefs  or 
unbeliefs  are  now  hurrying  on  with  amazing  celerity,  and 
make  as  much  progress  in  a  year  as  they  used  to  do  in  an 
age— at  this  present  moment  they  are  rushing  on  as  the 
waters  do  at  Niagara,  and  are  about  to  take  a  determined 
leap.  All  men  are  acknowledging  that  there  is  no  hope 
or  fear  of  a  new  faith  being  developed,— as  some  might 
wish  to  remove  their  doubts,  or,  as  I  know,  only  to  re- 
strict our  liberty  of  thought,  or  to  trouble  us  with  ghosts 
coming  out  of  the  graves  in  which  we  have  decently 
buried  them.  Mormonism,  I  expect,  will  be  the  last  new 
religion  appearing  in  our  world,  and  I  have  no  objection 
to  its  disappearing  with  the  rest. 


24  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

Professor  Tyndall  and  certain  middle-aged  philosophers 
are  still  telling  us  that  religion  is  natural  to  man  ;  and 
Herbert  Spencer  has  provided  a  grove  for  it  in  the  "  un- 
knowable," and  Huxley,  we  may  believe,  is  there  paying 
his  devotions,  "  chiefly  of  the  silent  sort."  They  are  cor- 
rect historically  in  saying  that  in  ages  past  man  has  been 
a  religious  animal.  The  few  noted  exceptions,  such  as 
Lucretius  and  Hume,  prove  the  rule  ;  they  may  be  com- 
pared to  those  anticipations  of  coming  man  which  Agassiz 
took  such  delight  in  pointing  out  in  certain  anticipatory 
organs  of  the  earlier  geological  ages.  By  our  new  theory 
of  development  we  can  account  for  all  this.  We  can  show, 
on  evolution  principles,  how  man  should  insist  on  having 
some  object  to  fear  or  to  trust,  and  that  this  tendency 
should  take  certain  shapes ;  that  he  should  first  be  a 
fetich,  then  an  idolater  and  a  polytheist,  and  finally  a 
theist,  with  all  sorts  of  intermediate  forms,  such  as  Popery 
with  its  one  God  and  its  Virgin  and  saints,  and  Protestant- 
ism with  its  one  God  and  Bibliolatry.  All  this  grew  out 
of  man's  position,  out  of  his  felt  wants  produced  by  his 
environment,  and  the  stages  of  his  intelligence  and  tastes. 
In  the  struggle  with  his  surroundings,  man  felt  that  there 
was  a  power  above  him  and  independent  of  him,  guiding 
Nature  in  a  mysterious  way,  and  restraining  him  by  terri- 
ble penalties.  We  now  know  this  to  be  Development, 
which  is  all  but  deified  by  my  old  master,  "  An  Evolu- 
tionist." We  younger  men,  led  by  Darwin  and  Spencer, 
who,  however,  are  being  left  behind  by  us,  have  seen 
clearly  how  all  this  has  been  produced,  and  we  know  and 
are  sure  that  all  religion  must  disappear.  The  veil  has 
been  withdrawn,  and  we  discover  how  haggard  and  repul- 
sive the  prophet  is  who  so  long  kept  us  in  terror.  The 
secret  has  been  let  out,  or  rather  we  discover  that  there  has 
been  no  secret  The  temple  has  been  opened,  as  that  at 
Jerusalem  once  was,  and  it  is  found  that  there  are  there  no 


Confession  of  an  Agnostic.  25 

tables  of  the  law,  no  mercy-seat,  no  pot  of  manna,  no  rod 
that  bu4ded,  and  that  there  never  were  any  such  objects, 
except  in  the  superstitious  imaginations  of  the  worshippers. 
In  the  struggle  for  existence,  which  is  the  characteristic 
of  our  world,  "  the  fittest  survive  ;  "  and  we  have  the  law 
of  development,  which  is  our  temple,  standing,  while  the 
superstitions  are  dying  out  like  the  extinct  races  of  ani- 
mals, and  these  contests  of  religion  with  science  are 
merely  like  the  writhings  and  death-struggles  which  Hugh 
Miller  used  so  graphically  to  describe  among  the  animals 
of  the  Old  Red  Sandstone  when  they  could  no  longer  live 
in  the  new  and  better  state  of  things.  We  are  at  present 
in  a  transition  state,  like  that  between  one  geological  era 
and  another,  and  every  belief  is  unsettled  ;  and  our  young 
men  are  driven  from  the  old  to  the  new,  and,  for  a  space, 
from  the  new  back  to  the  old,  by  the  recoiling  waves. 
The  turmoil  of  warring  elements  will  soon  cease,  and 
there  can  be  no  doubt  that  this  will  end  in  a  settled  state 
of  confirmed  unbelief.  We  are  now  in  the  tossings  and 
the  foam  where  the  cataract  has  fallen,  but  the  surviving 
stream  will  soon  flow  on  peacefully  and  resolutely.  Our 
youth,  reared  at  our  advanced  colleges  in  England,  Ger- 
many, and,  of  later  years,  in  the  United  States,  and 
reading  our  scientific  works,  such  as  those  of  Darwin, 
Spencer,  Huxley,  and  Tyndall,  and  our  progressive  peri- 
odicals, such  as  the  Fortnightly,  the  Nineteenth  Cent2iry^ 
and  The  Popular  Science  Monthly,  know  not  what  to  be- 
lieve. But  the  bolder  of  them  will  soon  come  to  the  con- 
clusion that  it  is  no  matter  what  they  believe,  it  being 
certain  that  there  is  no  supernatural  religion,  and,  there- 
fore, in  fact,  no  religion  to  believe  in  ;  while  the  weaker 
will  skulk  back  in  a  cowardly  manner  to  the  popular 
Christianity,  and  quietly  shelter  themselves  from  annoy- 
ance in  a  creed  in  which  they  have  no  faith.  It  may 
require  another  struggle  and  convulsion  before  all  men 


26  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

have  the  courage  openly  to  avow  the  unbehef  in  their 
hearts. 

We  are  under  great  obhgations  to  the  men  represented 
by  "An  Evolutionist,''  of  the  age  now  passing  away  into 
the  past  as  the  dawn  does  before  the  day.  They  have 
awaked  us  from  a  troubled  dream  into  which  we  can 
never  again  fall.  They  occupy  important  positions  in 
some  of  our  higher  coUeges,  European  and  American. 
They  talk  to  their  young  men  and  in  their  addresses  to 
popular  audiences  of  a  faith  which  they  still  cherish  and 
which  they  mean  to  hold  by,  but  they  do  not  deign  to 
tell  us  what  it  is  or  Vv-hat  its  foundation.  With  many  of 
them  it  is  a  determination  to  cling  to  some  broken  spars 
of  the  shipwrecked  vessel,  to  keep  them  from  sinking  in 
bottomless  waters.  Such  persons  disclaim  with  indigna- 
tion the  charge  of  atheism,  and  they  go  to  church  at  times 
to  save  appearances,  and  would  rather  that  their  children, 
especially  their  daughters,  would  adhere  to  some  form  of 
religion.  With  some  the  profession  of  religion  is  mere 
vaporing  and  pretence,  is  in  fact  hypocrisy  to  avoid  pubhc 
odium  and  the  business  injury  it  might  do  them.  In  the 
case  of  others  it  is  a  wild  cry  proceeding  from  an  emptied 
heart,  which  has  had  its  idol  pulled  down,  and  with  noth- 
ing to  take  its  place.  But  the  struggle  will  be  only  for 
a  brief  space  ;  owing  to  the  rapidity  of  the  evolution  in 
the  pregnant  womb  of  time,  much  more  rapid  than  in  the 
earlier  revolutions  of  opinion.  The  travailing  has  begun, 
and  the  birth  must  soon  follow.  The  old  faith  is  nearly 
dead  in  Germany,  is  kept  alive  merely  by  infidel  theolo- 
gians, and  will  soon  have  to  be  buried  out  of  sight.  Sus- 
tained by  Oxford  and  Cambridge,  which  only  half  believe, 
it  is  clinging  to  a  feeble  life  in  England,  and  will  probably 
continue  to  do  so  for  an  age  longer.  The  lease  of  an  age 
longer  may  be  allowed  it  in  America,  where  it  has  had  a 
convulsive  activity  given  it  by  sensational  preaching  and 


Confession  of  an  Agnostic.  27 

by  revivals  which  disgust  all  men  of  intelligence.  New 
hereditary  instincts  are  being  already  evolved  in  the 
wombs  of  mothers  without  their  knowing  it,  embodying 
and  transmitting  the  doubts  and  the  unbelief  of  the  father, 
and  rendering  all  credence  of  an  old  creed  or  a  new  phy- 
siologically impossible,  and  these  will  go  down  from  father 
to  son  and  one  generation  to  another— just  as  the  old 
religious  beliefs  used  to  do. 

My  old  master  was  ever  telling  me  that  he  had  to  follow 
truth  whithersoever  it  might  lead  him,  even  should  this  be 
into  an  utterly  unknown  region.  In  this  respect  I  follow 
him.  But,  in  doing  so,  I  am  driven  by  the  momentum  he 
gave  me  further  on  than  he  had  light  or  courage  to  go.  I 
cannot  return  to  the  flesh-pots  of  Egypt,  and  I  resign 
myself  to  the  principles  which  the  scientists  and  philoso- 
phers of  his  age  have  propounded.  What  I  have  to  do  is 
to  pursue  these  to  their  logical  consequences,  and  this 
though  it  should  lead  me  to  conclusions  from  which  he 
would  shrink,  more  especially  as  having  to  lecture  to  young 
men,  whom  he  would  not  have  abandon  religion  alto- 
gether. I  confess  I  have  had  to  pass  through  some  terri- 
ble struggles  (Herbert  Spencer  has  shown  that  this  world 
has  been  one  of  struggle  with  its  environment  from  the 
beginning)  before  I  reached  my  present  firm  position.  I 
have  had  to  resist  the  remembrance  of  a  father's  counsels 
of  prudence,  and  an  impulsive  mother's  entreaties,  and 
some  hereditary  instincts  which,  in  spite  of  all  my  efforts 
to  subdue  them,  crave  at  times  for  light  and  guidance  and 
comfort  from  a  supernatural  power.  But  logic,  following 
science,  has  driven  me  on  to  my  present  place,  and  left 
me  no  retreat,  having  thoroughly  shut  up  the  road  be- 
hind me. 

One  after  another  of  the  old  beliefs  which  I  got  by 
that  powerful  law  of  nature,  heredity,  and  in  which  I  was 
trained  by  my  mother  when  the  religious  feeling  was  upon 


28  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

her,  have  been  peeled  off  Hke  the  husks  and  scales  of  a 
bursting  bud,  or  as  the  blossoms  are  blown  away  when  the 
fruit  is  being  formed.  I  am  not  to  defend  the  positions 
which  have  been  so  successfully  gained  and  thoroughly 
established  by  the  great  men,  many  of  them  still  living, 
of  the  age  immediately  preceding  my  own.  My  father's 
father  had  felt  the  influence  of  Tom  Paine  and  the  French 
Revolution,  and  started  doubts  and  uttered  scoffs  which 
sank  deep  into  the  soul  of  his  son ;  and  from  these  that 
son,  my  father,  could  never  deliver  himself.  But  he  saw 
the  excesses  that  followed  the  convulsions  of  opinion,  and 
he  could  not  on  the  one  hand  uphold  the  system  that  led 
to  them,  while  on  the  other  every  seed  of  faith  had  been 
rooted  out  from  his  bosom.  So  he  shut  himself  up  in 
silence  and  opened  his  mind  to  no  one.  My  mother  was 
full  of  religious  emotion  ;  but  had  no  steady  faith,  or  in 
fact  consistent  religious  conduct.  My  teacher  in  the  state 
school  professed  neither  religion  nor  irreligion,  did  not 
seem  to  have  had  any  earnest  belief,  and  at  times  let  out 
a  scoff  which  showed  what  was  passing  within.  My  edu- 
cation was  completed  under  "  an  evolutionist."  He  came 
originally  from  England,  and  had  felt  the  undermining 
influence  of  the  philosophy  of  James  Mill  (who  had  thor- 
oughly imbibed  the  principles  of  Hume),  which  was  con- 
firmed by  the  abler  exposition  of  the  negative  system  of  his 
son,  Mr.  John  Stuart  Mill.  He  was  a  professor  in  one  of  our 
most  advanced  and  liberal  colleges.  His  public  lectures 
were  simply  undermining,  showing  that  the  arguments  for 
the  separate  existence  and  immortality  of  the  soul  and  for 
the  existence  of  God  are  not  conclusive.  But  in  quiet 
conferences  in  his  study  he  ridiculed  the  religion  of  un- 
reasoning faith,  of  blood,  and  of  eternal  punishment,  and 
talked  enthusiastically  of  a  new  religion,  rational  and  be- 
nevolent, about  to  appear,  and,  like  the  sun,  dispel  all 
darkness.     The  inherited  seeds  of  belief  derived  from  an 


Confession  of  an  Agnostic.  29 

indifferent  father,  with  some  physiological  units  (Spencer 
can  explain  what  these  are)  descending  from  the  body  of 
my  scoffing  grandfather,  predisposed  me  to  listen  to  him. 
I  had  doubts  of  the  Bible  from  an  early  date,  though  I 
clung  to  it  for  a  time,— as  a  man  falling  down  a  precipice 
will  hold  by  a  stalk  of  grass  to  stay  his  descent.  As  my 
father  never  made  any  profession  of  religion,  I  was  horri- 
fied with  the  thought  coming  upon  me  at  the  time  when 
he  died  that  he  would  have  to  wriggle  for  ever  in  the  lake 
of  fire  and  brimstone,  and  the  language  of  Burns  rung  in 
my  ears — 

"  In  hell  they'll  roast  ye  like  a  herring." 

I  was  now  told  that  the  argument  for  the  Divine  ex- 
istence was  inconclusive.     It  proceeds  on  the  principle 
that  every  effect  has  a  cause,  which  may  be  true  within 
our  experience,  and  "  a  reasonable  distance  beyond,"  as 
John  Mill  says  ;  but,  as  we  know  nothing  of  the  nature 
of  a  cause,  it  may  not  be  true  of  world-making  of  which 
we  have  no  experience.     When  on  one  occasion  I  saw 
death  with  grim  visage  looking  in  at  the  curtain  of  my 
bedstead,  I  did  feel  reluctant  to  give  up  all  hope  of  living 
in  another  worid  ;  but  then  I  had  no  God  to  guarantee 
the  belief,  and  as  physiology  had  taught  me  that  the  soul 
was  a  complication  of  nerves,  and  philosophy  had  taught 
that  things  were  merely  an  aggregation  of  appearances 
or  impressions,  I  saw  that  we  have  no  proof  whatever  that 
the  soul  would  live  when  the  nerves  are  dissolved,  and 
that  the  impressions  would  continue  after  the  senses  that 
produced  them  ceased  to  act     The  Christian's  hope  is  a 
pleasant  dream  to  those  who  believe  in  Jesus  Christ,  but 
it  can  bring  but  little  comfort  to  the  great  body  of  man- 
kind, who,  as  not  having  passed  through  the  process  of 
regeneration,   must   perish   everiastingly.     So  I  resisted 
the  temptation  presented  in  my  hour  of  weakness,  and 


30  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

have  ever  since  been  more  courageous,  as  having  fought 
a  battle  and  gained  a  victory. 

It  was  a  favorite  principle  with  my  instructor  that  the 
students  could  not  have  a  high  culture  without  the  assist- 
ance of  the  theatre.  So  I  got  introduced  to  a  most 
fascinating  woman,  the  daughter  of  a  line  of  actors  and 
actresses.  I  might  have  been  joined  to  her  in  a  civil  con- 
tract. But  the  theatre,  which  I  am  prepared  to  defend, 
when  it  is  properly  managed,  which  it  surely  may  be, 
though  I  admit  it  seldom  is,  was  not  the  fittest  place  for  the 
training  of  a  young,  impulsive  girl  with  such  predilections 
as  she  inherited  from  her  parentage,  and  I  was  afraid  to 
connect  myself  with  her  in  life  by  a  legal  bond,  though  I 
meant  to  act  honorably  toward  her.  So  we  lived  together 
in  a  relation  which  the  prudish  regarded  as  criminal,  and 
the  men  and  women  of  the  world  spoke  of  as  ambiguous. 
I  lost,  in  consequence,  some  of  my  early  friends.  My 
mother  refused  to  visit  me  and  my  partner  in  our  home  ; 
and  when  we  met  by  accident  she  fell  on  my  neck  and 
poured  forth  floods  of  tears.  But  I  kept  firm  to  my  prin- 
ciples, and  gathered  round  me  a  body  of  young  men  and 
women  whose  domestic  relations  were  not  much  different 
from  my  own,  and  who  indulged  with  me  in  all  manner 
of  speculations  on  religious  subjects. 

My  preceptor  had  introduced  me  to  his  favorite  authors. 
I  read  carefully  Grote's  "  History  of  Greece,"  and  was 
led  to  take  the  positive  view  of  the  development  of  events 
in  history.  But  I  received  the  greatest  profit  and  plea- 
sure from  the  works  of  Goethe,  whom  I  reckon  the  great- 
est of  modern  poets.  Shakespeare  may  possess  more 
varied  genius,  but  then  he  takes  and  describes  life  as  he 
finds  it,  and  starts  no  speculative  questions  and  suggests 
no  change  or  improvements  in  society  or  in  opinions. 
Goethe,  on  the  other  hand,  holding  no  fixed  creed,  views 
all  sides  of  a  question,  even  as  he  sought  to  pore  into  the 


Confession  of  an  Agnostic.  31 

hearts  of  all  the  ladies  he  fell  in  love  with,  and  so  has  be- 
come the  poet  of  an  inquiring,  doubting,  unsettled  age, 
I  took  my  science,  as  might  be  expected,  from  Darwin, 
Huxley,  and  Tyndall,  and  became  firmly  convinced  that 
the  doctrine  of  evolution  established  in  our  days  is  more 
important  than  the  law  of  gravitation  discovered  by  New- 
ton. Mr.  J,  S.  Mill  was  my  first  philosopher  ;  but  I  saw 
that  no  one  could  build  any  grand  theory  on  his  negative 
principles,  and  I  resorted  to  Herbert  Spencer,  who,  by 
help  of  modern,  physical  science,  can  construct  the  whole 
universe.  My  favorite  novelist  was  George  Eliot,  who, 
though  brought  up  in  evangelical  principles,  has  had  her 
faith  in  historical  religion  undermined  by  Strauss,  whom 
she  translated,  and  her  faith  in  natural  religion  by  her 
husband,  Mr.  Lewes',  science  and  religion.  The  domes- 
tic relations  which  had  been  maintained  by  some  of  these 
eminent  persons,  such  as  Goethe,  Mill,  and  George  Eliot, 
drew  me  toward  them  more  closely,  and  helped  to  justif}'- 
my  connection  with  the  woman  who  had  such  control 
over  me. 

Once  more  I  had  a  terrible  struggle.  I  was  again  pros- 
trated by  a  dangerous  disease.  My  partner  nursed  me  with 
excessive  devotion.  At  my  suggestion  she  had  followed 
George  Eliot,  and  like  her  had  inspected  all  creeds,  me- 
diaeval, reformation,  methodistic,  and  Jewish,  but  merely 
as  we  inspect  the  machinery  of  a  clock  on  a  mantelpiece, 
to  see  its  springs.  Her  heart,  however,  was  melted  on 
the  occasion  of  my  illness,  and,  as  she  watched  by  my 
bedside,  she  expressed  an  earnest  wish  that  I  would  yield 
to  some  kind  of  religion — she  did  not  much  care  which — 
and  implored  me  to  have  our  connection  sanctioned  by 
marriage  ;  and  urged,  as  an  argument,  that  Goethe,  and 
Mill,  and  George  Eliot,  had  all,  in  the  end,  betaken  them- 
selves to  wedlock.  But  I  had  the  courage  to  deny  her 
request.     Most  unfortunately,  the  new  science   and  phi- 


32  Conjlzcts  of  the  Age. 

losophy  have  not  yet  settled  the  most  perplexing  of  all 
questions,  what  should  be  the  relation  of  the  sexes.  But 
all  advanced  thinkers  are  agreed  that  Christian  marriage, 
with  its  indissoluble  connection,  is  most  unjust  and  irra- 
tional, interfering  with  liberty,  and  making  love  a  bond- 
age, and  I  felt  that  it  would  be  a  weakness  and  a  derelic- 
tion in  me  to  sanction  it  by  my  example.  We  are  in  a 
more  advanced  age  than  those  persons  referred  to  who 
betook  themselves  to  marriage,  and  it  becomes  us  to  walk 
worthy  of  the  times  and  of  our  convictions.  My  partner 
was  deeply  wounded,  threatened  to  separate  from  me, 
and  actually  left  my  house.  She  was  led  by  her  hered- 
itary instincts  to  go  on  the  stage  for  a  time  ;  but  she  had 
too  much  personality  of  character  to  enter  into  the  per- 
sonality of  others,  and  her  acting  was  a  failure.  Finding 
herself  helpless,  she  had  to  return,  and  I  was  glad  that 
she  did  so. 

We  are  getting  on  as  well  as  most  married  couples  do  ; 
all  the  better  because  neither  is  tied  to  the  other  by  any 
leo-al  bond,  which  would  certainly  chafe  the  souls  of  both 
of  us.  The  romance  of  life  is  now  over  with  us,  and  we 
submit  to  our  position.  I  have  found  her  engaging  in 
practices  utterly  inconsistent  with  my  life-theory.  She 
told  me  boldly,  almost  impertinently,  that  she  must  have 
a  religion  and  a  worship,  and  I  noticed  her  stealing  away 
to  the  Catholic  cathedral  on  the  occasion  of  its  high  fes- 
tivals. I  was  at  first  amazed  and  indignant  when  I  dis- 
covered that  she  had  set  up  an  altar  in  our  nursery.  It 
was  of  a  composite  structure.  Proceeding  from  her  heart, 
it  unconsciously  represented  the  stages  through  which 
religion  has  passed.  There  were  flowers  in  profusion, 
corresponding  to  fetichism  or  nature- worship  ;  there  were 
idols,  and  among  these  the  Virgin  and  Child,  correspond- 
ing to  the  worship  of  human  heroes  ;  and  there  were 
statues  of  philosophers  hke  Rousseau  and  Comte,  point- 


Confession  of  an  AgJiostic.  2>Z 

ing  to  the'worship  of  mind.  The  whole  had  a  theatrical 
look,  like  stage  scenery,  and  much  of  the  time  of  the 
mother  and  girls  was  employed  in  ornamenting  it.  I  re- 
solved on  repressing  the  practices,  and  threatened  to  burn 
the  figures  ;  but  this  only  led  to  a  scene,  and  I  found  it 
best  to  let  nature,  that  is,  heredity,  have  its  own  way.  It 
may  take  an  age  or  two  to  remove  the  inherited  diseases 
of  the  past. 

My  oldest  son  was  a  boy  of  bright  parts,  and  I  pro- 
ceeded to  train  him,  as  James  Mill  did  his  son  John.  I 
have  the  most  confident  faith  in  the  progress  of  the  race. 
Natural  selection  has  developed  new  species  in  the  past. 
Why  should  it  not  do  so  in  the  future  ?  The  coming  man 
should  as  far  surpass  the  present  man  as  the  present  man 
does  his  ancestor,  the  monkey  or  the  fish.  Indeed,  I 
cherish  the  hope  that,  in  thousands  of  ages,  man  will 
rise  as  far  above'  his  now  condition  as  he  has  already 
risen  above  the  ascidian.  I  had  a  secret  expectation- 
that  my  son  might  have  some  original  quality,  which, 
would  go  down  to  posterity.  But  man's  progress  is  still 
greatly  hindered  by  his  environment.  My  boy's  brain, 
was  of  an  excitable  character,  like  his  mother's,  and, 
gave  way  under  the  strain  to  which  it  was  subjected.  I 
would  rather  not  express  the  feelings  that  rose  as  I  con- 
signed him  to  the  tomb.  There  was  not  only  disappoint- 
ment but  resentment,  but  I  could  vent  it  only  on  objects 
which,  like  the  cold  mountains  and  distant  stars,  took  no 
notice  of  me.  My  oldest  would  have  followed  my  schemes, 
but  my  second  son  has  no  such  enthusiasms.  His  mother 
at  one  time  made  him  spend  a  considerable  time  at  the 
domestic  altar,  but  he  has  become  wearied  of  it  and  in- 
dulges his  mother's  taste  for  theatrical  performances. 
She  has  succeeded  in  getting  our  two  daughters  to  enter 
into  her  spirit,  and  I  think  it  better  not  to  interfere.  Since 
the  death  of  my  first-born,  I  feel  I  must  give  to  the  world 
3 


34  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

directly  what  I  would  have  given  first  to  him.  My  phi- 
losophy tells  me  that  we  must  overlook  the  individual  in 
attending  to  the  species. 

Meanwhile  our  system  is  making. progress  all  around. 
We  have  with  us  knowingly,  or  unknowingly,  all  the 
shining  spirits  of  the  age.  The  great  historian  Grote  was 
altogether  with  us,  and  has  shown  us  how  events  can  go 
on  by  natural  causes  without  a  providence  to  ride  upon 
them  and  guide  them.  Science  is  entirely  in  our  own 
hands,  and  there  is  not  a  naturalist  under  thirty  years  of 
age  who  does  not  believe  in  evolution.  There  has  really 
been  no  reply  to  Darwin  except  the  denunciations  of 
priests  and  sectaries.  St.  George  Mivart  is  too  great  a 
naturalist  (and  so  has  made  immense  concessions  to  the 
theory)  and  too  poor  a  philosopher  to  counteract  Darwin. 
The  more  knowing  of  the  clergy  have  been  obliged  to 
change  their  tactics,  and,  admitting  development,  are 
trying  hard  to  reconcile  it  with  their  theology.  The 
theories  and  the  nomenclature  of  our  school  are  circulating 
through  all  our  literature  and  our  scientific  text-books ; 
and  we  read  in  every  periodical  of  "  evolution,"  of  "  de- 
velopment," of  "the  struggle  for  existence,"  of  "the 
survival  of  the  fittest,"  and  "  heredity."  Our  young  men 
are  imbibing  the  hypothesis  as  unconsciously  as  they  draw 
in  health  with  the  air  they  breathe. 

Philosophy  has  now  come  in  to  give  stability  to  the 
system.  We  have  two  living  philosophers  of  our  own. 
We  have  Spencer,  whose  field,  like  that  of  Bacon,  is  all 
knowledge,  and  who  can  construct  theories,  adlibittim,  to 
account  for  all  phenomena  and  bring  them  within  his  am- 
bitious grasp.  Quite  as  influential  as  he,  we  have  Hux- 
ley, installed  by  Darwin  as  specially  the  philosopher  of  his 
school.  By  his  courage  and  outspokenness  he  has  gained 
the  whole  Saxon  race  who  love  frankness,  and  by  his  style 
he  can  command  the  attention  of  the  common  people.   He 


Confession  of  an  Agnostic.  35 

has  just  published  a  summary,  with  a  criticism  of  Hume's 
system,  which  furnishes  an  immovable  foundation  to  our 
Agnostics,  and  will  henceforth  be  the  text-book  of  our 
philosophy. 

Hume  may  be  regarded  as  the  founder  of  Agnostics. 
From  what  a  host  of  unfounded  beliefs  did  he  dehver  the 
thought  of  mankind  !  Thomas  Reid  sought  to  bring  these 
back,  but  had  no  argument  to  urge  except  that  of  com- 
mon sense,  which  has  no  right  to  dictate  in  philosophy, 
and  all  the  erudition  of  Sir  W.  Hamilton  has  not  been  able 
to  buttress  him  up.  Kant  allowed  to  Hume  all  that  we 
care  to  claim.  Kant  has,  in  fact,  done  more  to  establish 
our  principles  than  any  other  philosopher.  He  started 
with  our  position  that  man  can  never  know  anything 
about  things  ;  that  all  he  knows  or  can  know  are  phe- 
nomena in  the  sense  of  appearances.  Grant  us  only  this, 
and  our  system  has  got  a  foundation  from  which  it  can 
never  be  moved.  We  can  now  let  Kant  and  his  followers 
in  Great  Britain  and  America  have  as  many  high-sounding 
transcendental  forms  as  they  please  (say  the  forms  of 
space  and  time,  the  categories  of  quantity,  quality,  rela- 
tion, and  modality,  and  the  ideas  of  God,  freedom,  and 
immortality),  as  long  as  they  suppose  them  formed  by  the 
mind,  in  no  way  relating  to  things,  and  having  no  objec- 
tive existence.  Huxley  has  evidently  a  partiality  for 
Kant's  phenomena ;  but  he  wisely  falls  back  on  Hume 
and  on  Impressions,  and  has  given  us  the  whole  of  Agnos- 
ticism, which  is  evidently  destined  to  be  the  final  philoso- 
phy in  a  nutshell. 

People  believe  that  they  know  things ;  that  they  know 
themselves,  as  perceiving,  thinking,  resolving  ;  and  know 
material  objects  immediately  around  them.  But  in  all  this 
they  are  adding  by  their  imaginations  to  what  we  actually 
perceive.  All  that  we  actually  know  are  Impressions.  I 
suppose  that  I  have  a  red  rose  before  me,  but  I  have  really 


o 


6  Cojiflids  of  the  Age. 


no  evidence  of  the  existence  of  anything  else  than  a  red 
impression,  and  it  is  an  illusion  to  conclude  that  I  am  a 
person  perceiving  it,  or  that  there  is  a  rose  perceived. 
Our  impressions  are  of  three  kinds  :  SENSATIONS,  PLEAS- 
URES AND  Pains,  Relations.  To  this  ^&  have  to  add 
Ideas  which  are  simply  copies  of  our  impressions.  This 
is  the  whole  "content  of  the  mind."  The  relations  which 
the  mind  can  discover  are  of  impressions  and  not  of  things. 
They  are  three  in  number  :  coexistence,  succession,  and 
similarity.  It  has  been  proved  by  physiology  that  all  these 
impressions,  with  their  relations  and  ideas,  are  the  product 
of  brain-action.* 

This  is  his  simple  but  comprehensive  science  of  mind. 
No  other  has  given  us  so  few  faculties.  Even  Hume  has  a 
larger  number.  It  enables  him  the  more  easily  to  ascribe 
the  whole  to  material  action.  In  this  system  we  are  not 
troubled  with  such  ideas  as  moral  good,  freedom,  and  in- 
finity. Mind  is  a  congeries  of  impressions  the  result  of 
brain-action,  which  brain-action— Huxley  does  not  see 
this — is  again  simply  an  impression.  The  mind  has  not 
the  power  (which  metaphysicians  allot  to  it)  of  discovering 
the  relation  of  identity,  and  there  is  no  proof  of  its  having 
any  identity  or  persistency  of  any  kind.  Metaphysicians 
have  said  much  about  the  mind  perceiving  the  relation 
of  causation.  But  cause  and  effect  are  mere  invariable 
succession  as  far  as  our  limited  experience  goes.  People 
argue  that  there  is  a  God,  the  cause  of  the  order  and  fit- 
ness of  the  world,  but  the  argument  is  palpably  incon- 
clusive, as  we  have  no  reason  to  believe  that  cause  and 
effect  rule  beyond  our  experience,  and  we  have  no  ex- 
perience of  world-making.  The  argument  for  the  soul's 
immortality  is  gone,  now  that  the  soul  is  found  to  be  a 
bundle  of  impressions  produced  by  a  bundle  of  impressions 


This  is  an  epitome  of  "Hume,"  by  Professor  Huxley. 


Confession  of  an  Agnostic.  2>1 

which  we  call  nerves.  This  leaves  responsibility  and  a 
judgment-day  among  the  superstitions  of  the  past.  Nor 
are  we  entitled,  in  order  to  reheve  our  perplexities,  to  ap- 
peal to  a  supernatural  revelation ;  for  it  would  be  as  dif- 
ficult to  prove  that  there  has  been  a  miracle  as  to  prove 
the  existence  of  a  centaur ;  and  the  supposed  testimony 
is  not  able  to  carry  such  a  weight.  Huxley  has  said  little 
about  morality  and  the  relation  of  the  sexes  ;  but  all  this 
will  be  cleared  up  in  the  great  work  on  "  Morals"  which 
Herbert  Spencer  is  busy  in  preparing,  and  which  will 
soon  be  published  amid  loud  cheers,  with  only  a  few  hisses 
which  will  show  how  much  some  are  afraid  of  it.  Hux- 
ley has  laid  the  foundation  and  Spencer  will  put  the  cope- 
stone  on  our  building.  It  thus  appears  that,  when  people 
ask  what  Agnostics  are,  we  can  now  hand  them  our  creed 
and  confession  written  out  in  clear  articles. 

As  more  satisfactory  than  these  able  expositions  and 
defences,  we  see  Agnostics  working  its  proper  effects  and 
forming  character.  There  have  been  anticipations  of  this 
result  in  all  ages  in  some  men  and  even  a  few  women — 
such  as  Miss  Martineau — being  able  to  live  without  reli- 
gion. But  these  are  becoming  more  numerous  as  creeds 
are  dying  out,  just  as  races  of  animals  did  in  the  geologi- 
cal ages  when  they  were  no  longer  suited  to  their  environ- 
ment. I  may  refer  to  Babington  Macaulay,  brought  up 
in  the  strictest  sect  of  Pharisees,  and  yet  never  referring, 
after  he  had  passed  through  the  training  of  Cambridge 
University,  to  religion  as  either  troubling  or  comforting 
him.  We  have  a  like  example  in  a  late  great  orator  and 
statesman  of  Boston,  who  tells  us  that  he  had  no  desire 
for  or  aversion  to  death  or  immortality.  But  the  most 
noted  example  by  far  of  the  effect  of  our  training  is  seen 
in  our  illustrious  living  novelist,  the  greatest  analyst  of 
character  that  ever  lived.  Von  Baer  and  embryologists 
have  shown  us  that  the  young  animal  in  the  womb  goes 


38  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

through  in  a  few  months  the  same  stages  as  its  ancestors 
have  done  in  long  geological  ages.  George  Eliot  has  in 
her  own  person  gone  through  in  a  few  years  the  stages 
which  developing  thought  has  been  passing  through  for 
generations.  She  has  in  her  own  person  exemplified  the 
grand  generalization  of  M.  Comte,  and  has  advanced  from 
the  theological,  up  through  the  metaphysical,  and  has  now 
attained  the  positive  stage.  Starting  from  evangelical 
faith  she  gave  us  "Janet's  Repentance  "  and  "  Dinah." 
As  years  rolled  on,  we  have  a  searching  and  an  exposure 
of  the  hollow  religion  of  the  respectable  middle-classes  in 
England.  In  "  Daniel  Deronda  "  she  showed  that  all  re- 
ligions are  alike,  and  put  a  sort  of  galvanic  life  into  Juda- 
ism. Her  husband  in  his  last  work  has  proved  that  psy- 
chology is  a  branch  of  physiology  and  to  be  advanced  by 
the  study  of  the  nerves ;  and  now,  as  evidently  having 
felt  his  influence,  she  is  constantly  accounting  for  peculi- 
arities of  character  by  heredity.  She  seems  now  incapa- 
ble of  entering  into  her  early  faiths,  and  to  have  lost  all 
her  former  ideals  (this  is  evident  in  her  resorting  to  the 
Jews):  and  in  " Theophrastus  Such,"  out  of  the  accu- 
mulated sweepings  of  her  study,  she  is  describing  such 
characters  as  we  may  expect  in  the  era  of  Agnostics  from 
one  who  has  imbibed  the  creed.  It  is  an  indication  of 
the  state  to  which  not  only  novel-writing,  but  poetry 
and  history,  must  come. 

I  have  thus  fully  explained  my  position.  I  am  not 
ashamed  of  it.  I  am  proud  of  it.  I  would  not,  for  all 
the  hopes  that  heaven  holds  out,  sink  back  into  the  low 
level  of  the  superstitious  world  I  have  left.  I  call  no  man 
master.  I  am  independent  and  free.  I  am  afraid  of  no 
power  above  me,  and  of  no  evil  in  the  future.  The  past 
is  past  and  cannot  touch  me ;  and  we  mean  to  make  and 
mold  the  world  to  come. 

Those  who  hold  our  creed  may  have  to  part  with  some 


Confessio7t  of  an  Agnostic.  39 

things  that  are  pleasant.  Now  that  we  know  better,  they 
can  please  us  no  longer.  The  charm  has  been  broken, 
and  can  never  be  restored.  It  is  certain  that,  now  that 
we  know  what  nature  is,  what  mind  is,  and  what  matter 
is,  we  shall  have  to  give  up  our  admiration  of  these. 
Schelling  labored  to  show  that  the  beautiful  arose  from 
a  correspondence  between  the  subjective  and  objective 
worlds.  Men  like  Wordsworth,  and  his  worshipper,  Prin- 
cipal Shairp,  have  been  raving  about  the  loveliness  of 
vale  and  lake,  and  the  grandeur  of  rock  and  mountain. 
But  all  this  illusion  has  been  dispelled.  Mr.  Grant  Allen 
is  proving  scientifically  that  all  beauty  arises  from  pleas- 
ant physiological  sensations.  A  shrewd  critic  in  the  Con- 
temporary Review  for  November,  1877,  has  put  an  end 
to  all  the  vaporing  so  common  for  the  last  age  or  two 
about  the  beauties  of  nature.  "  If  language  be  intended 
not  to  veil  but  to  convey  thought,  the  phrase  'the  poetic 
interpretation  of  Nature  '  implies  that  Nature  means  some- 
thing, and  has  something  to  say.  I  must  venture  to  af- 
firm, in  contravention  of  this  implication,  that  Nature  is 
a  dumb  oracle,  who  of  herself  says  nothing,  but  will  most 
obligingly  emit  any  voice  the  poet  chooses  to  put  inside 
of  her."  This  is  the  necessary  issue  of  all  recent  science, 
and  of  the  philosophical  view  of  the  mind. 

To  one  trained  in  rigid  and  not  superficial  science, 
beauty  so  reckoned  must  very  much  disappear,  along 
with  other  mental  perceptions.  Colors,  apart  from  what 
our  fancy  adds  to  them,  are  merely  vibrations  in  an  ether 
of  which  we  know  little  or  nothing,  the  variety  being  pro- 
duced simply  by  the  rates  at  which  they  travel.  The 
supposed  sublime  or  lovely  forms  of  nature  ;  the  lofty 
mountains,  the  deep  canyons,  the  jagged  ridges,  the  bold 
promontories,  the  sweet  valleys  do  not,  in  the  view  of  a 
genuine  geologist,  differ  from  the  elevations  and  depres- 
sions setthng  in  a  semi-Hquid  mass  as  it  cools  and  as  seen 


40  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

by  a  fly  as  it  crawls  over  it.     When  the  deception  is  de- 
tected this  feehng  of  admiration  must  vanish. 

It  is  a  fact  that  our  men  of  science  do  not  glorify  the 
works  of  nature  so  much  as  the  common  observer,  who 
clothes  them  with  a  fictitious,  that  is,  a  l"alse  lustre.  As 
research  reveals  the  realities  of  things,  men  will  be  deliv- 
ered from  the  foolish  sentimentalities  and  ravings  about 
beauty  which  boarding-school  misses  do  so  indulge  in. 
The  ancients  did  not  rise  into  such  raptures.  Humboldt 
has  remarked  that  all  the  passages  about  the  beauty  of 
natural  scenery  in  the  Greek  and  Roman  classics  might 
be  printed  on  a  single  page — Homer  speaks  of  certain 
rich  plains  as  being  good  for  feeding  asses.  The  poet 
Goldsmith  passed  last  century  through  the  scenery  which 
in  this  century  Scott  has  made  so  romantic  and  he  simply 
complains  of  the  inconveniences  to  which  he  was  put. 
Bishop  Berkeley  passed  about  the  same  time  over  the 
Alps,  and  was  impressed  only  with  their  horrors. 

Scientific  men  now  know  that  mechanical  motion  can 
explain  everything.  Laplace  felt  that  he  had  no  need  of 
the  hypothesis  of  a  god  to  explain  the  celestial  motions. 
Comte  maintained  that  the  heavens  now  declare  the  glory, 
not  of  God,  but  of  Hipparchus  and  Newton.  Tyndall  is 
evidently  not  very  solemnly  impressed  with  the  hackings 
and  devastations  seen  in  the  Alps.  People  now  feel  that 
it  was  appropriate  enough  in  the  poet  Shelley  to  write 
"atheist"  after  his  name  on  the  shattered  and  useless 
rocks  of  Switzerland.  It  is  well  that  we  should  know 
what  is  the  real  world  in  which  we  live,  and  not  have  a 
deceitful  glamour  thrown  over  it  by  an  idle  fancy  whose 
tricks  are  being  detected.  I  say  this  even  though  it 
should  land  us  in  pessimism.  I  would  rather  fight  to  the 
death  with  the  evil  than  submit  to  pretension  and  delu- 
sion. But  men  are  now  coming  to  see  that  it  is  wisdom 
just  to  take  things  as  they  seem  and  not  to  waste  energy 


CoJifession  of  a7t  Agnostic.  41 

in  seeking  anything  within  or  beyond,  which,  if  it  exist, 
can  never  be  discovered  by  man. 

If  Agnostics  has  taken  away  some  pleasant  feehngs  it 
has,  at  the  same  time,  rid  us  of  more  unpleasant  ones. 
It  delivers  us  from  the  regrets,  the  remorses  which  have 
hitherto  so  tortured  humanity.  What  propriety  can  there 
be  in  mourning  over  acts  which  have  been  evolved  by 
laws  which  work  irresistibly,  and  allow  the  will  an  appa- 
rent and  no  real  freedom,  as  was  so  elegantly  shown  by 
Tyndall  in  his  Birmingham  address  ?  Let  life  be  enjoyed 
as  long  as  it  is  enjoyable,  and  then  parted  with  when  it 
becomes  intolerable.  What  a  relief  to  the  miseries  of  our 
world  if  men  were  taught  that  they  can  take  away  life 
when  it  pleases  them,  with  no  risk  of  being  afterward 
tormented  eternally !  As  society  advances,  I  beheve 
there  will  be  an  authorized  means  of  ending,  in  a  painless 
manner,  the  life  of  those  who  so  wish  it  and  when  they 
wish  it ;  and  this  without  requiring  them  to  imbrue  their 
hands  in  their  own  blood,  and  exposing  them  to  pubhc 
scorn. 

Mr.  Mill  has  thrown  out  the  idea  that  there  may  be  a 
religion  without  a  belief  in  a  God.  I  do  not  call  it  a  reli- 
gion, but  it  may  be  a  faith  to  take  the  place  of  the  old 
faiths.  There  may  be  grand  aims,  gathering  round  them 
all  the  energies  of  our  nature.  If  Agnostics  shears  off 
some  of  the  superficial  aesthetic  sentiments,  it  may  gen- 
erate and  evolve  some  deeper  mental  forces,  like  those 
exhibited  by  Paul  and  by  Mohammed,  only  devoted  to 
more  liberal  ends.  I  feel  this  power  moving,  like  the 
strong  wind,  within  me.  We  see  it  working  with  tremen- 
dous impetus  in  the  Nihilists  of  Russia,  in  dehcate  women 
quite  as  much  as  strong  men,  fearlessly  facing  Siberian 
banishment  and  the  gibbet.  I  have  myself  felt  the 
impulse  that  moved  the  communists  of  Paris,  and  led 
them  to  massacre  their  archbishop.    In  nearly  every  coun- 


42  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

try  there  are  tyrants  to  be  mowed  down  because  they  are 
crushing  liberty.  In  every  country  there  are  idols  to  be 
cast  down.  How  eagerly  do  I  enter  into  the  spirit  of 
Cambyses  and  the  Persians  when  they  hewed  down  the 
huge  bulls  of  Egypt,  and  of  John  Knox  when  he  dashed 
to  the  ground  the  images  of  the  Virgin,  and  of  Christ  him- 
self; and  I  feel  that  1  am  called  on  to  go  and  do  likewise  ! 
And  as  we  thus  courageously  fight  with  our  opposing 
environment,  the  walls  will  fall  down,  and  after  the  battle 
will  come  peace,  when  all  foes  have  been  destroyed — as 
the  idolatrous  Canaanites  were. 


III. 

WHAT  MORALITY  HAVE  WE  LEFT? 

BY   A  NEW   LIGHT   MORALIST. 

At  no  time  in  the  history  of  the  world  has  there  been 
such  a  rapid — I  might  say  revolutionary — advance  of 
opinion  as  within  the  last  few  years.  As  much  progress 
is  now  made  in  a  year  as  used  to  be  in  an  age.  Two  or 
three  years  ago,  intelligent  men,  though  they  had  left 
Christianity  behind,  fondly  clung  to  the  idea  that  faith  was 
not  gone,  and  "An  Evolutionist"  advertised  for  a  new 
religion  (July,  1878).  Under  the  sentiment  that  then 
prevailed,  the  most  intellectual  university  in  this  country 
started  an  endowment  for  its  theological  seminary,  and 
made  the  religion  it  teaches,  not  Christianity,  but  a  uni- 
versal religion,  in  which  a  fair  place  might  be  given  to 
Buddhism,  which,  though  inane  in  its  creed  and  abject  in 
its  requirements,  is  at  least  better  than  the  religion  of 
blood  and  perdition.  This  measure  met  with  considerable 
opposition  from  our  more  advanced  thinkers,  who  main- 
tain that  the  day  of  all  religions,  even  of  Buddhism,  has 
passed  away  forever.  At  this  stage — that  is,  in  the  period 
of  transition*  when  the  old  had  not  given  way  before  the 
new — appeared  the  article  written  by  an  Agnostic  (Sep- 
tember, 1879).'  About  this  time,  one  who  pretends  to  all 
knowledge — the  president  of  a  college  called  by  the  late 
Professor  Diman  the  Ehrenbretstein  of  orthodoxy — feeling 
that  religion  was  tottering,  formally  avowed  that  there 
was  truth  in  development ;    which,  I  may  remark,  will 


44  Conjlicts  of  the  Age. 

soon  sweep  away  the  half-way  house  which  he  has  built, 
and  to  which  some  have  retreated  to  shelter  them  from 
the  coming  flood.  Since  that  time  thought  has  taken  an- 
other cataract  leap,  and,  since  the  publication  of  Spencer's 
"Data  of  Ethics,"  our  promising  youth  are  everywhere 
inquiring  into  the  foundations  of  morality,  which  had 
previously  been  considerably  shaken  by  the  doubts  in- 
sinuated in  Sidgwick's  "  Method  of  Ethics." 

I  am  myself  a  graduate,  of  a  few  years'  standing,  of  an 
orthodox  college,  of  the  Puritan  type  by  heredity.  That 
college  has  for  the  last  year  or  two  been  considerably  ex- 
ercised about  development ;  some  of  its  teachers  and  a 
number  of  its  independent-minded  students  rejoicing  in 
the  new  light,  while  the  great  body  of  them  are  in  a  state 
of  somnolence,  from  which  they  will  soon  have  a  terrible 
awakening.  Here  I  may  remark  that  the  majority  of 
the  Middle  States  colleges  in  America  are  in  much  the 
same  position — asleep  on  the  edge  of  a  volcano  soon  to 
burst.  A  few  of  the  lately  established  State  Colleges 
have  the  courage  to  make  no  profession  "of  religion.  With 
others  the  profession  is  hypocritical,  as  they  are  retaining 
the  form  merely  to  save  appearances,  which  they  will 
part  with  as  soon  as  it  can  be  done  with  safety.  The 
scientific  schools,  I  may  add,  have  not  studied  the  ques- 
tion ;  but,  not  being  instructed  in  any  creed,  they  are 
nearly  ready  to  join  the  advancing  movement,  as  they 
know  that  development,  which  renders  the  interposition 
of  God  unnecessary,  is  as  certain  as  gravitation,  or  any 
other  law  of  nature. 

I  was  trained  by  my  mother  (my  father  was  not  a  pro- 
fessing Christian,  and  took  no  special  charge  of  me)  in  a 
Puritan  rehgion  and  morality  somewhat  relaxed.  Her 
training  in  respect  of  the  Sabbath  and  of  amusements  was 
not  nearly  so  strict  as  that  of  her  father  and  mother,  and 
that  was  considerably  below  the  model  of  their  grand- 


What  Morality  have  We  Left?  45 

parents  ;  still  it  was  stiff  enough,  and  was  all  founded  on 
the  Bible.  In  college  I  fell  in,  at  first  reluctantly,  but 
afterward  heartily,  with  the  current  of  the  times,  with 
evolution  and  heredity  ;  and  was  a  great  admirer  of  Hux- 
ley and  Tyndall,  and  some  of  our  professors  who  favored 
their  views.  I  was  greatly  fascinated  with  the  eloquence 
of  the  great  Lynbrook  preacher  who,  from  time  to  time, 
visited  our  college,  and  with  the  freedom  of  opinion  and 
of  action  which  he  allowed  us ;  but,  as  he  had  no  philoso- 
phy and  no  science  and  no  consistency,  his  teaching  did 
not  tend  to  stay  or  stablish  me.  Since  my  graduation, 
being  free  from  all  parental  control  and  college  restraints, 
I  have  set  myself  to  ponder  some  very  vital  questions. 
Religion  I  know  is  gone,  and  all  traditional  belief  regard- 
ing a  supernatural  power,  the  immortality  of  the  soul,  and 
a  day  of  judgment.  I  have  to  consider  where  I  now  am. 
In  particular,  I  have  to  settle  whether  there  is  any  foun- 
dation left  for  morality. 

First.  My  mother's  morality  is  evidently  gone.  It  was 
founded  on  the  Hebrew  Scriptures,  and  consisted  in  a 
constant  appeal  to  God.  She  taught  me  to  pray  in  in- 
fancy, and  made  me  go  to  church  in  my  childhood.  She 
bade  me  not  to  tell  hes,  assuring  me  that  if  I  did  so  God 
would  punish  me.  My  father  concurred,  having  evidently 
no  other  principle  to  inculcate.  But  all  this  grew  less, 
and  finally  disappeared  under  my  new  teaching.  Except 
on  rare  occasions,  and  when  under  impulse  hereditary,  I 
gave  up  prayer,  as  I  had  no  God  to  pray  to.  When 
allured  to  evil,  I  am  not  sure  what  principle  to  fall  back 
upon.  If  I  avoid  falsehood,  it  must  be  from  some  other 
consideration  than  the  fear  of  hell. 

Seco7id.  The  ethical  teaching  of  my  college  professor 
is  also  gone.  My  teacher  belonged  to  what  is  called  the 
"  intuitive  "  school  of  morals,  which  has  had  mighty  influ- 
ence from  the  days  of  Bishop  Butler.     He  founded  moral- 


46  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

ity  upon  instinct  or  intuition ;  or,  as  it  is  called  since 
Kant's  time,  a  priori  reason — that  is,  upon  a  moral  power, 
or  conscience,  regarded  as  an  ultimate  and  independent 
arbiter.  But  this  mud  foundation  has  been  washed  away. 
Hume  and  J.  S.  Mill  ingeniously  explained  our  moral 
convictions  by  associations  of  ideas.  But  Herbert  Spen- 
cer has  shown  in  a  profounder  manner  that  these,  like  all 
other  intuitive  or  necessary  beliefs,  are  merely  the  pro- 
duct of  the  gathered  experience  of  our  ancestors,  animal 
and  human,  through  the  ascidian,  the  moUusk,  the  mon- 
key, on  to  man,  and  handed  down  by  heredity.  A  power 
gendered  of  such  materials  cannot  be  regarded  as  infalli- 
ble or  entitled  to  claim  supreme  authority.  The  ancestry 
of  conscience  has  been  inquired  into  ;  and  it  has  been 
shown  to  be  as  doubtful  as  apostolic  succession,  which 
has  flowed  through  so  corrupt  a  stream  of  popes. 

TJiird.  I  took  refuge  for  a  time  in  utilitarianism,  and 
then  in  hedonism.  It  seemed  to  me  so  beneficent  to  pro- 
mote the  welfare  of  all.  In  this  way  I  got  rid  of  that  sour 
and  ascetic,  that  stern  and  cruel  morality  which  was  dis- 
played in  burning  witches  by  our  Pilgrim  forefathers.  But 
my  professor  and  his  disciples  pressed  me  with  the  ques- 
tion :  What  sanction  have  we  for  the  principle  that  every 
man  ought  to  promote  the  greatest  happiness  of  the  great- 
est number  ?  What,  in  fact,  is  to  lead  any  one  to  look 
after  everybody's,  or,  indeed,  anybody's  happiness,  ex- 
cept his  own  ?  The  religious  man,  they  showed  me,  has 
a  motive  to  induce  him  to  follow  this  end.  God  has  com- 
manded him,  and  can  encourage  and  reward  those  who 
do  good.  The  intuitive  moralist  points  to  such  a  sanc- 
tion in"  our  essential  nature,  commanding  him  to  love  and 
obey  God  and  do  good.  The  two  combined  form  an 
amalgam  with  powerful  magnetic  attractions.  But  utili- 
tarianism has  in  itself  no  such  claim,  obligation,  or  duty. 
At  the  imperfect  stage  which  development  has  yet  reached, 


What  Morality  have  We  Left?  47 

I  am  afraid  that  the  motive  which  utiHtarianism  supplies 
will  not  be  able  to  prompt  men  to  great  actions  or  keep 
them  from  yielding  to  temptation.  We  shall  see,  as  Mr. 
Spencer  shows,  that  it  will  be  different  when  evolution 
has  done  its  work. 

Utilitarianism  draws  its  plausibility  very  much  from 
the  ambiguity  of  certain  phrases,  such  as  "  good,"  "  gen- 
eral welfare."  If  these  are  employed  simply  to  denote 
pleasure  or  happiness,  they  are  used  appropriately  enough. 
But  the  difficulty  in  that  case  is  to  show  that  there  is 
any  obligation  to  promote  the  general  happiness,  or  any 
happiness  except  our  own,  or,  indeed,  to  promote  our 
own  ultimate  happiness  in  preference  to  present  pleasure 
or  passion.  But  surreptitiously  and  illegitimately  these 
phrases  carry  with  them  a  meaning  carried  over  from  in- 
tuitive morals,  and  are  understood  as  moral  good  which 
brings  with  it  duty  and  obligation.  But  the  ambiguous 
middle  has  been  detected  and  exposed.  The  utilitarian 
theory  would  insist  that  men  ought  to  promote  the  greatest 
happiness  of  the  greatest  number,  but  this  ought  Is  of  the 
nature  of  an  innate  ox  a  priori  principle,  which  all  modern 
philosophy  rejects.  Intuitive  morals  founding  on  a  law 
does  insist  that  we  should  seek  the  happiness  of  the  great- 
est number.  But  utilitarianism  has  no  authority  to  go 
beyond  saying  that  you  may  do  so  if  you  choose.  If 
they  do  not  choose,  men  are  under  no  obligation  to  pur- 
sue any  one's  happiness  except  their  own — not  even  their 
own  permanent  happiness. 

Every  one  is  led  by  instinct  to  seek  pleasure.  Hedon- 
ism is  a  native,  natural,  and  genuine  theory  which  has 
great  attractions  for  me.  But  man  is  in  fact  led  by  other 
instincts,  coming  from  brute  ancestors,  and  differing  in 
different  individuals,  such  as  appetites,  attachments,  loves, 
and  hatreds.  Each  of  these  craves  for  gratification.  These 
special  appetences,  the  love  of  money,  of  sex,  or  of  praise, 


48  Confiicts  of  the  Age. 

have  often  greater  power  than  the  love  of  happiness  to 
others,  or  even  to  ourselves.  Men  will  often  gratify  their 
appetites  or  tempers,  being  quite  aware  that  their  doing 
so  is  contrary  not  only  to  the  happiness  of  others,  but  to 
their  own  happiness.  Most  people  will  indulge  their 
resentments,  even  though  these  should  bring  them  into 
trouble. 

Utilitarianism  is  thus  seen  to  be  powerless,  logically  and 
practically,  unless  it  is  supported  by  something  foreign  to 
itself.  It  was  brought  forth  and  set  up  as  a  system  when 
it  was  seen  that  the  innate  or  h  priori  theory  was  weak 
and  ready  to  die.  It  kept  back  the  advancing  tide  for  a 
time,  but  has  now  been  undermined  and  its  defences 
strewn  to  the  waves. 

Professor  Sidgwick,  of  Cambridge,  has  a  mighty  name  in 
England,  as  falling  in  with  the  spirit  of  the  transition 
period.  He  is  the  most  skilled  man  in  our  day  in  seeing 
and  expounding  doubts  and  difficulties.  With  great 
acuteness  he  has  pointed  out  the  illogical  nature  both  of  in- 
tuitionalism and  utilitarianism.  He  is  particularly  successful 
in  exposing  the  perplexities  and  uncertainties  of  the  calcu- 
lations which  ordinary  men  are  able  to  make  of  the  great- 
est happiness  of  the  greatest  number  in  order  to  determine 
the  path  of  duty  for  themselves,  and  the  consequent  lia- 
bility to  which  they  are  exposed  of  making  the  wish  the 
father  of  the  thought.  Having  pierced  each  of  the  twins 
with  his  ^harp  lance,  he  has  not  been  successful  in  his  at- 
tempt to  construct  a  living  body  of  morals  by  tying  the 
dead  bodies  together. 

Left  in  this  disheartening  position,  some  of  us  were 
looking  forward  for  years  to  Herbert  Spencer's  promised 
book  on  Ethics,  the  copestone  of  the  grand  building 
which  it  has  taken  him  so  long  to  erect.  I  expected  to 
find  in  it  an  advance  on  all  that  has  gone  before,  and  a 
solution  of  the  difficulties  that  still  press  on  those  of  us 


What  Morality  have  We  Left?  49 

who. have  given  up  the  theological,  the  intuitive,  and  utili- 
tarian ethics,  and  have  left  to  us  only  the  epicurean  or 
hedonistic,  without  knowing  how  to  justify  it  in  demand- 
ing more  than  the  appetite  for  the  present  pleasure.  The 
work  as  a  whole  has  disappointed  Mr.  Spencer's  numerous 
worshippers  in  this  country.  It  has  certainly  not  fulfilled 
the  end  which  I  expected  from  it.  It  is  a  book  not  so 
much  on  the  data  of  ethics — that  is,  of  the  principles  we 
are  entitled  to  start  with  in  ethics — as  an  exposition,  very 
masterly  I  admit,  of  the  grand  moral  results  to  be  reached 
thousands  of  ages  hence,  when  development,  biological 
and  sociological,  has  done  its  work. 

He  begins  with  an  inquiry  into  conduct,  which  is  de- 
fined as  "  acts  adjusted  to  ends."  This  is  his  definition^ 
which  would  apply  to  a  burglar's  key  and  a  forger's  signa- 
ture. "Always  acts  are  called  good  as  they  are  well 
or  ill  adjusted."  This  tends  to  widen  and  liberalize  ethics 
considerably.  It  contains  one  most  import  .nt  truth — he 
makes  morality  a  means,  and  not  an  end,  grim  and  in- 
flexible, as  our  old  moralists  did.  He  maintains  that  the 
end  in  virtue  is  happiness  ;  this  makes  him  avowedly  a 
hedonist  or  utilitarian.  I  am  not  sure  that  this  utilitari- 
anism is  in  any  respect  different  from  or  superior  to  that 
of  Hume,  Bentham,  and  Mill,  though  he  thinks  it  is  so. 
He  stands  up  for  rational  utilitarianism.  All  right;  but 
what  are  his  reasons  in  this  rationalism  ?  The  theological 
moralist  has  such  a  reason  in  the  revealed  law,  the  in- 
tuitionalistin  the  natural  law,  which  laws  require  us  to 
look  to  the  general  happiness.  But  where  does  Spencer 
get  his  data  ?  He  gets  them  from  a  long  geological  de- 
velopment, which  the  great  body  of  people — men,  women, 
and  children — do  not  understand,  and  which  the  select 
few  who  do  understand  them  may  not  value  and  will 
not  be  swayed  by.  He  is  perplexed,  as  all  before 
him  have  been,  with  the  difficulty  of  hatching  altruism 
4 


50  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

out  of  self-love,  when  we  have  no  independent  moral 
law  requiring  us  to  love  others.  He  speaks  of  politi- 
cal, religious,  and  social  sanctions.  The  religious  sanc- 
tion he  has  banished  to  the  region  of  the  unknown  and 
unknowable,  whence,  happily,  not  even  a  ghost  will  ever 
come  out  to  trouble  us.  The  political  and  social  sanctions 
must  evidently  depend  on  the  general  beliefs  and  senti- 
ments of  the  community  and  of  the  age  ;  and  these,  having 
no  fixed  moral  standard  like  natural  law  or  revealed  law, 
will  vary  from  age  to  age,  and  be  different  in  one  country 
from  what  they  are  in  another  ;  and  there  is  much  in  these 
late  discussions  to  undermine  them. 

But  he  has  done  one  great  service — he  has  drawn  the 
distinction  between  absolute  and  relative  morality.  In 
this  way  he  has  delivered  us  young  men  from  the  in- 
flexible morality  which  the  theologians  have  been  preach- 
ing— without  practising.  The  absolute  morality  applies 
only  to  a  distant  future  ;  many  will  rejoice  that  for  the 
present  they  are  not  under  it.  He  tells  that  "  conduct 
which  has  any  concomitant  of  pain  or  any  painful  con- 
sequence is  partially  wrong,"  and  "the  coexistence  of  a 
perfect  man  and  an  imperfect  society  is  impossible."  Un- 
numbered ages  must  run  their  course  before  there  can  be 
such  morality.  "Ethics  has  for  its  subject-matter  that 
form  which  universal  conduct  assumes  during  the  last 
stages  of  evolution  " — adding  "  these  last  stages  in  the  evo- 
lution of  being  when  man  is  forced  by  increase  of  numbers 
to  live  and  move  in  presence  of  his  fellows." 

In  the  present  state,  which  is  one  of  struggle,  man  is 
under  the  relative  ethics  Here,  "it  is  the  least  wrong 
which  is  relatively  right."  He  tells  us  that,  "  throughout 
a  considerable  part  of  conduct,  no  guiding,  no  method  of 
-estimation,  enables  us  to  say  whether  a  proposed  course 
is  even  relatively — as  causing  proximately  and  remotely, 
specially  and  generally — the  greatest  surplus  of  good  over 


What  Morality  have  We  Left?  51 

all."  He  says  truly,  and  greatly  to  our  comfort,  that, 
"  as  now  carried  on,  life  hourly  sets  the  claims  of  present 
self  against  the  claims  of  future  self,  and  hourly  brings  in- 
dividual interests  face  to  face  with  the  interests  of  other 
individuals,  taken  singly  or  as  associates.  In  many  such 
cases,  the  decisions  can  be  nothing  more  than  compro- 
mises." He  illustrates  this  by  the  case  of  a  farmer  whose 
political  principles  prompt  him  to  vote  in  opposition  to 
his  landlord.  "The  man  in  such  a  case  has  to  balance 
the  evil  that  may  arise  to  his  family  against  the  evil  that 
may  arise  to  his  country.  In  countless  such  cases  no  one 
can  decide  by  which  of  the  alternative  courses  the  least 
wrong  is  likely  to  be  done."  This  relative  ethics  stands 
in  admirable  relation  to  man  as  he  now  is.  We  see  at 
once  that  it  does  not  require  us  to  make  such  sacrifices  as 
the  early  Christians,  the  Waldensians,  the  Huguenots,  the 
Puritans,  and  Covenanters  made,  without  at  all  counting 
the  cost  of  their  sufferings  against  the  happiness  they 
might  have  had,  had  they  taken  the  other  alternative  and 
submitted. 

As  an  ethics  for  a  hundred  thousand  years  or  ages 
hence,  Spencer's  Ethics  is  perfect  and  will  be  so  acknowl- 
edged when  that  time  comes.  The  fine  nervous  organ- 
ization which  constitutes  Mr.  Spencer's  mind  will  then  be 
dissolved  and  unconscious  ;  but  he  will  be  thoroughly 
appreciated  by  the  finer  organizations  dwelling  on  the 
earth,  and  placed  above  our  highest  philosophers  and 
scientists.  He  does  not  announce  very  clearly  the  chro- 
nological relation  between  this  period  of  perfect  morality 
and  the  final  conflagration  which  he  and  all  scientific  men 
say  is  to  close  our  present  world  that  it  may  start  anew. 
But  all  things  are  tending  toward  the  era  of  absolute 
morality,  when  pain  and  what  men  call  sin  will  have  dis- 
appeared. In  the  struggle  for  excellence,  all  sharp  points 
and  roughnesses  will  be  removed  and  everything  become 


52  Co7iflicts  of  the  Age. 

rounded  and  smoothed,  as  the  pebbles  which  He  on  our 
beach  have  been,  by  the  dashing  of  the  ocean  currents. 
The  heights  having  been  ground  down  and  the  hollows 
filled,  all  will  be  one  rich  plain, — "  every  valley  shall  be 
filled  and  every  mountain  and  hill  shall  be  brought  low.'* 
"The  conduct  to  which  we  apply  the  name  good,"  says 
Spencer,  "is  the  relatively  more  evolved  conduct."  The 
jugglers  in  ancient  Egypt,  the  gypsies,  the  hereditary 
thieves  in  our  gre^it  cities,  seem  a  considerably  evolved 
class,  and  answer  his  definition  ;  but  they  will  then  be 
crushed  out  by  something  yet  more  evolved.  In  the 
struggle,  the  fittest  will  always  survive,  and  the  good  will 
go  down  by  heredity  and  become  instinctive.  "  Swords 
will  be  turned  into  plowshares  and  spears  into  pruning- 
hooks,"  for  there  wdll  be  no  evil  to  fight  against.  All 
men,  and  women,  and  children  wull  be  moral,  for  nobody 
will  have  any  motive  to  sin — that  word  which  our  savans 
carefully  avoid,  that  thing  which  the  popular  religious 
creeds  have  created  by  their  restrictions.  Men  will  have 
a  much  more  pleasant  millennium  than  the  Christian  one, 
w^hich  makes  the  felicity  proceed  from  a  perpetual  Sab- 
bath and  psalm-singing.  Men  will  then  do  moral  acts  as 
"  matters  of  course,"  as  they  eat,  and  sleep,  and  wed  by 
the  instincts  gendered  in  them.  Men  will  do  moral  acts 
without  being  conscious  of  it,  without  willing  out,  without 
meaning  it.  There  will  be  no  need  of  such  deeds  and 
sacrifices  as  were  required  of  our  heroes,  for  all  will  flow 
on  according  to  our  wishes.  There  will  be  no  need  of 
commandments  which  do  so  stir  up  rebellion  in  independ- 
ent spirits,  for  all  action  will  be  natural  and  easy.  As  our 
great  thinker  says  so  profoundly  :  "  The  sense  of  duty  or 
moral  obligation  is  transitory  and  will  diminish  as  fast  as 
moralization  increases." 

Herbert   Spencer's  Ethics  wnll  certainly  be   the  final 
ethics.     But  the  question  does  press  itself  upon  us,  what 


Whai  Morality  have  We  Lcftf  53 

is  to  be  the  ethics  for  the  time  now  present  and  passing  ? 
What  it  is  to  be  myriads  of  years  hence  is  an  interesting 
scientific  problem.  But  man  is  yet  in  too  undeveloped  a 
state  to  be  attracted  by  these  distant  motives,  which  have 
as  little  power  over  men  or  women  generally  as  the  most 
distant  star  or  particle  of  star  dust  has  on  the  motion  of 
our  earth.  There  needs,  then,  some  man,  very  inferior 
it  may  be  to  Spencer,  to  draw  out  a  provisional  morahty, 
always  of  the  relative  sort.  Professor  Fiske  might  be  bet- 
ter employed  in  this  supplementary  work  than  in  simply 
bringing  out,  in  graceful  style,  the  views  which  his  mas- 
ter is  quite  competent  to  unfold  and  defend  in  his  own  ro- 
bust way.  For  myself,  I  do  feel  that  this  final  morality  is 
not  fitted  to  guide  me  in  those  critical  struggles  through 
which  I  have  already  passed,  and  through  which  I  may 
yet  have  to  pass.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  world  is  not 
ready  to  be  swayed  and  guided  in  the  intended  way  by 
the  profound  biological  motives  supplied  by  our  having 
been  evolved  from  the  brute  ;  and  it  is  conceivable  that 
some  may  argue  that  as  they  are  descended  from  the 
brutes  they  may  live  as  the  brutes.  It  is  quite  accordant 
with  the  principles  of  evolution  that,  if  the  generation 
living  at  any  one  time  does  not  keep  to  the  moral  stan- 
dard, the  succeeding  one  will  rather  become  worse,  and 
heredity  will  transmit  the  evil  to  the  ages  that  follow. 

Fourth.  The  morality  of  conscience  is  gone.  Every- 
body acknowledges  the  existence  of  conscience — no  one 
more  freely  than  Mr.  Spencer  ;  but  it  must  be  kept  in  its 
own  place.  A  mist,  an  irradiated  mist,  has  crowned  it  as 
a  halo.  It  was  believed  to  be  the  immediate  gift  of  God, 
his  vicegerent  and  his  witness.  But  in  our  day  they  have 
had  the  courage  to  inquire  into  the  authority  of  this  im- 
perious lord.  Bold  thinkers  have  made  a  search  among 
the  old  geological  records,  and  found  its  genealogy  and 
its  ancestry  ;  and  its  lineage  not  so  heavenly  as  was  sup- 


54  Coiiflicts  of  the  Age. 

posed.  "The  intuitions  of  a  moral  faculty  are  the  slowly- 
organized  results  of  experience  received  by  the  race,"  says 
Herbert  Spencer,  In  fact,  the  conscience  has  been  dis- 
covered to  be  merely  a  nervous  structure.  "  I  believe," 
says  our  authority,  "that  the  experiences  of  utility,  or- 
ganized and  consolidated  through  all  past  generations  of 
the  human  race,  have  been  producing  corresponding  ner- 
vous modifications,  which  by  continued  transmission  and 
accumulation  have  become  in  us  certain  faculties  of  moral 
intuition."  It  thus  appears  that  our  conscience  consists 
of  nervous  modifications  become  hereditary. 

It  is  preposterous  to  represent  such  a  functionary  as 
revealing  an  unalterable  and  eternal  law,  or  its  necessi- 
tating us  to  believe  in  a  perfect  law  or  lawgiver.  It  is 
simply  absurd  to  speak,  with  Butler,  of  its  being  entitled 
to  decide  anything  infallibly  and  authoritatively.  It  is 
at  best  a  mere  impulse,  like  other  nervous  affections  and 
appetites,  which  may  be  inconsistent  and  war  against 
each  other.  It  is  now  to  be  regarded,  not  as  a  king 
reigning  with  a  divine  right,  but  simply  a  subordinate, 
and  by  no  means  a  very  consistent  or  trustworthy  officer 
in  a  republic.  Being  the  product  of  circumstances,  it  has 
the  force  of  the  circumstances.  It  has  the  authority,  not 
of  God,  but  of  our  brute  ancestors.  The  circumstances 
being  to  some  extent  the  same,  the  decisions  are  so  far 
alike.  The  circumstances  being  so  far  different,  the  judg- 
ments are  also  different.  The  conscience  of  the  East  does 
so  far  differ  from  that  of  the  West ;  the  conscience  of  the 
Jew  from  that  of  the  Christian.  So  far  from  being  infal- 
lible, it  has  often  been  a  deceiver. 

O  Conscience,  what  crimes  have  been  committed  in  thy 
name !  Thy  laws  have  often  been  more  cruel  than  those 
of  Draco,  and  should  be  written  in  blood.  Claiming  the 
authority  of  God,  thou  hast  so  pictured,  or  rather  cari- 
catured, Him,  as  to  make  Him  offensive  to  all  benevolent 


What  Morality  have  We  Left?  55 

minds.  Calling  thyself  Duty,  thou  hast  perverted  all 
morality.  Is  there  a  crime  which  thou  hast  not  at  times 
sanctioned — murder  among  the  Thugs,  deceit  among  the 
Jesuits  ?  When  men  have  done  evil,  thou  hast  lent  thy 
sanction,  confirmed  them  in  their  wickedness,  and  aggra- 
vated their  crimes.  In  all  good  conscience,  as  he  claims, 
Saul  breathed  out  threatenings  and  slaughter,  and  haled 
men  and  women  to  prison.  The  Inquisition,  with  its  in- 
struments of  torture,  is  thy  symbol.  In  obedience  to  thy 
command,  good  men  have  been  burnt  at  the  stake,  or 
shut  up  in  the  darkness  of  the  dungeon  till  they  became 
maddened.  What  is  vastly  worse,  thou  hast  in  wilfulness 
deprived  whole  communities  of  innocent  enjoyments,  and 
led  multitudes  to  bow  before  the  most  abject  superstitions, 
and  to  expose  themselves  to  the  most  terrible  lacerations. 

Since  my  graduation,  I  have  passed  through  serious 
scenes  in  this  yet  imperfectly  evolved  world,  of  which 
struggle  for  existence  and  for  pleasure  is  the  character- 
istic. I  feel  a  delicacy  in  opening  my  heart  to  the  public  ; 
but  good  may  arise  from  doing  so,  as  people  cannot,  by 
mere  general  statements,  be  made  to  understand  the 
struggle  passing  through  the  minds  of  our  thinking  youth. 
Under  precisely  such  a  pressure  as  that  which  I  have  been 
able  to  bear,  through  the  struggle  between  the  past  now 
gone  and  the  future  to  come,  a  fellow-student  of  mine, 
high  in  the  estimation  of  his  college,  cut  his  throat. 

My  father  had,  unfortunately,  fallen  into  habits  of  in- 
temperance, and  there  is  a  tendency  in  my  nervous  sys- 
tem to  crave  for  excitement.  While  in  the  college  I  lived 
in  the  circle  of  the  most  spirited  youths  of  their  quadren- 
nial ;  and  at  times  I  had  to  drink,  especially  at  certain 
meetings  of  the  Greek  Letter  Society,  of  which  I  vv^as  an 
enthusiastic  member.  My  pen  cannot  describe  the  resist- 
ance I  had  to  offer.  I  enjoyed  more  than  others  our  so- 
cial meetings.     I  was  always  the  most  adventurous  and 


56  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

most  hilarious  of  them  all.  But  next  morning,  what  lan- 
guor and  lassitude  !  After  too  many  excesses  my  con- 
science began  to  talk  to  me  pretty  loudly.  But  then  I 
had  learned  that  conscience  was  the  product  of  circum- 
stances, was  merely  a  stage  in  the  progress  of  things,  and 
had,  therefore,  no  binding  authority.  I  did  turn  back  at 
times  to  my  mother's  religion  with  a  fond  eye — as  Eve, 
according  to  the  myth,  must  have  looked  back  on  the 
Garden  of  Eden.  But  a  flaming  sword,  turning  every 
way,  prevented  my  entrance.  Often,  in  my  weakness, 
did  I  wish  that  there  were  only  some  one  to  forgive  the 
past,  and  enable  me  to  start  with  my  burden  removed. 
I  was  in  a  college  in  which  there  were  occasional  "  revi- 
vals "  of  religion  (so  called),  and  I  was  all  but  carried 
along  by  the  current  of  prevailing  feehng.  Some  of  the 
leaders  were  mere  pretenders,  and  I  scorned  them.  But 
others  were  genuine  youths,  and  I  accepted  their  offer  to 
pray  with  me.  But  I  could  not  join  with  them,  being 
held  back  by  the  underlying  unbelief,  as  the  frost  in  the 
ground  in  winter  keeps  the  genial  rain  from  penetrating 
into  the  soil.  Often  did  I  wish  that,  like  some  of  my 
classmates,  I  had  a  throne  of  grace  to  go  to,  and  there  un- 
bosom myself.  But,  when  I  tried  it,  I  got  no  answer  from 
the  supposed  mercy-seat.  My  prayers  came  back  upon 
me  likd  vapors  frozen  into  hail  as  they  ascended.  I  rea- 
sonably concluded  that  the  whole  feeling  was  an  illusion, 
gendered  by  the  inherited  superstitions  of  the  past.  I  am 
thus  left  alone,  and  yet  feeling  at  times  as  if  I  could  not 
stand  of  myself.  At  such  seasons  I  feel  as  if  I  were  en- 
titled to  demand  that  my  masters  should  supply  me  with 
a  morality  suited  to  these  moods  of  weakness — as  I  ac- 
knowledge them  to  be. 

I  feel  a  yet  greater  difficulty  in  opening  another  strug- 
gle, as  savans  call  it — temptation,  as  my  mother  would 
have   called  it,  proceeding   on   the   obsolete  theological 


What  Morality  have  We  Left?  57 

creed.  I  was  thrown  in  the  way  of  a  lady  a  few  years 
older  than  myself,  who  had  been  unfortunate  in  her  mar- 
riage relation,  quite  as  much  as  Mr.  Lewes  had  been  when 
he  fell  in  with  Miss  Evans.  She  had  been  treated  inhu- 
manly by  her  husband,  and  yet  had  no  proof  of  any  crim- 
inal act  on  his  part  such  as  would  secure  her  a  divorce  in 
the  old-fashioned  State  of  New  Jersey,  in  which  she  lived, 
and  which  is  so  far  behind  the  more  advanced  State  in 
which  I  sojourn.  I  listened  sympathizingly  to  her  tale  ; 
I  felt  for  her  deeply  ;  I  admired  her  full-blossomed  and 
flamboyant  beauty,  and  her  lively  spirit,  and  soon  a  softer 
feeling  was  kindled,  ran  through  my  veins,  and  penetrated 
my  whole  frame.  What  was  I  to  do  ?  Ask  her  to  unite 
her  destiny  to  mine  ?  I  consulted  my  authorities.  Dur- 
ing my  struggle  the  *'  Data  of  Ethics  "  was  published.  I 
turned  eagerly  to  it,  expecting  a  solution,  only  to  find 
that  the  mighty  speculator  had  not  faced  the  subject.  I 
turned  to  my  models  :  to  Goethe,  my  favorite  poet ;  to 
Mill  and  Comte,  my  philosophers,  before  Spencer  super- 
seded them  ;  to  Miss  Evans,  my  analytic  novelist,  who 
penetrates  human  motives  as  distinctly  as  I  see  the  springs 
and  wheels  of  my  clock  on  the  mantel-piece.  I  read  Wil- 
helm  Meister,  and  was,  I  confess,  somewhat  disgusted 
with  its  filth,  while  I  admired  its  genius.  Sympathiz- 
ingly, I  wept  over  the  sorrows  of  Werther.  Getting  no 
guiding  principle  from  these  quarters,  under  an  irresist- 
ible impulse  I  offered  myself  to  her.  Though  she  had 
encouraged  my  attentions,  and  allowed  me  liberties  such 
as  no  married  woman  should  have  done,  she  declined  my 
overture,  and  had  the  impertinence  to  give  as  a  reason 
that  I  had  no  religion,  to  which  I  replied  that  at  least  I 
knew  that  she  had  none.  This  altercation  brought  on  a 
counter-irritation,  which  so  far  conquered  my  love-sick- 
ness. The  question  often  occurs  to  me,  in  what  state  I 
should  have  been  had  she  accepted  my  offer. 


58  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

I  am  still  a  young  man,  with  the  world  before  me — the 
only  world  I  believe  in.  My  mother  died  lately.  I 
waited  upon  her  in  her  dying  hours,  I  listened  to  her 
prayers  and  her  counsels,  but  could  not  in  honesty  give 
her  the  consolation  of  faUing  in  with  them.  My  father  is 
about  to  take  a  second  wife — a  widow  with  children — and 
I  see  crucial  questions  arising  before  me  as  to  family 
property  and  domestic  relationship  in  which  I  must  be 
sorely  tried.  My  profession  being  the  hard  one  of  a 
lawyer  has  also  its  slippery  positions.  At  times  I  feel  as 
if  I  needed  a  power  behind  to  uphold  me.  But  I  know 
that  this  is  only  the  remains  of  hereditary  prejudice,  with 
which  posterity  in  its  more  evolved  state  will  not  be 
troubled. 

I  protest  against  the  thought  that  I  am  seeking  to  in- 
jure morality ;  this  would  make  me  either  a  fool  or  a 
madman,  I  am  simply  lopping  off  the  rotten  branches, 
that  the  tree  may  be  healthier.  Much,  indeed,  of  what 
has  hitherto  been  regarded  as  morality  must  be  aban- 
doned ;  we  have  to  part  with  the  weak  limb  if  the  body 
is  to  be  kept  alive.  The  old  tables  of  the  law  supposed 
to  have  been  given  by  God  at  Mount  Sinai,  and  which 
are  as  forbidding  and  as  sterile  as  that  granite  mountain, 
have  now  been  as  effectually  shattered  in  pieces  as  when 
Moses  threw  them  down  as  he  saw  the  liberty  the  people 
craved.  The  first  table  cannot  be  mended,  as  we  cannot 
be  bound  to  love  the  Lord  with  all  our  heart  when  we 
know  that  the  flaw  in  the  argument  for  the  Divine  exist- 
ence has  been  detected  and  exposed.  It  will  not  do  in 
this  age  to  rewrite  the  inscriptions  on  the  second  table, 
as  all  of  them  are  provokingly  prohibitory,  and  some  of 
them  are  quite  antiquated  and  require  to  be  changed  and 
made  less  repulsive.  When  everything  else  is  improving, 
when  religion  is  waning  and  science  brightening,  it  is 
time  that  morality  were  putting  on  a  new  face.      If  a 


What  Morality  have  We  Left?'  59 

stern  religion  like  Calvinism  has  given  offence,  I  am  sure 
a  rigid  morality  has  repelled  a  still  greater  number  of 
promising  youths.  After  all,  morality  has  always  been 
practically  connected  with  faith,  and  when  we  have  parted 
with  the  old  religion  we  shall  have  to  part  also  with  the 
old  morahty.  A  new  and  relaxed  edition  of  the  com- 
mandments must  be  provided  and  published, — no,  not  of 
the  commandments,  for  there  is  no  one  to  command  them  ; 
but  of  the  invitatio7is,  which  must  all  (fewer  than  ten  will 
serve)  appear  in  a  gay  dress,  and  with  smiles  on  their 
faces  to  attract  young  men  and  maidens.  I  am  not  com- 
petent to  draw  out  this  law  ;  our  leaders  must  do  it.  I 
can,  however,  point  out  a  few  things  which  must  be  at- 
tended to  in  the  construction. 

First.  We  cannot  insist  any  longer  that  in  order  to  be 
morally  right  good  must  proceed  from  love.  Love  can- 
not be  commanded.  According  to  the  old  law,  goodness 
was  supposed  to  consist  in  law  and  love  ;  the  law  has  dis- 
appeared, as  there  is  no  lawgiver,  and  the  love  cannot  be 
insisted  on.  Love  has  no  fundamental  place  in  the 
morality  of  our  great  masters,  such  as  Mill  and  Spencer. 
The  latter  rejects  it.  He  rejects  expressly  certain  theories  : 
**(i)  Those  theories  that  look  to  the  character  of  the 
agent ;  (2)  to  the  nature  of  the  motives  ;  (3)  the  quality 
of  the  deeds."  There  is  a  difficulty  in  showing  how  the 
great  body  of  mankind  can  be  induced  to  do  the  outward 
act,  to  keep  from  equivocation  and  evil-speaking,  and  to 
live  honestly  and  purely  in  all  circumstances,  unless  they 
are  swayed  by  love.  A  provision  must  be  made  to  secure 
this  for  the  present  generation  in  the  new  code.  We  shall 
see  that  this  is  provided  by  Spencer  in  the  latter  stages 
of  development,  when  all  men  will  be  moral. 

Second.  There  must  be  an  allowance  made  for  breaches 
of  the  law.  Our  stiff  divines  and  moralists  have  been 
acting  on  a  very  different  principle.     The  law  is  said  to  be 


6o  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

eternal  and  unchangeable,  and  then  they  argue  legiti- 
mately, if  you  admit  their  premises,  that  all  men  are  under 
a  heavy  condemnation  or  curse — a  tenet  which  weighs 
down  so  many  buoyant  spirits  and  makes  them  believe 
that  exertion  is  useless  because  hopeless.  All  mankind — 
even  the  best — do  in  fact  transgress  ;  and  it  is  surely  wiser 
to  permit  them  to  do  what  we  cannot  prevent.  The 
father  acts  in  this  way  toward  his  children,  if  he  is  not  to  be 
viewed  and  hated  by  them  as  a  tyrant,  and  we  may  act  in 
the  same  way  toward  grown-up  children.  No  doubt  our 
opponents  will  puzzle  us  with  the  question  :  how  great  is 
the  license  to  be  ?  For  on  such  a  principle  every  one  will 
feel  him.self  to  be  at  liberty  to  go  aside  from  the  straight 
line  in  his  own  way  :  one  by  relaxing  the  law  of  speaking  the 
truth  ;  another  the  law  of  filial  obedience  ;  another  the  law 
of  temperance  ;  another  the  law  of  chastity  or  of  rigid  hon- 
esty. I  admit  that  there  must  be  rules  or  understandings 
on  this  subject  prescribed  with  statesman-like  wisdom.  This 
is  one  of  the  desiderata  of  our  time  which  I  am  urging  our 
leaders  to  supply.  Meanwhile,  one  thing  is  clear  :  the  law 
can  continue  to  stand  only  by  being  accommodated  to  the 
times  and  the  actual  practice  of  mankind.  *'  The  Sabbath 
was  made  for  man,  and  not  man  for  the  Sabbath."  On 
the  same  principle,  the  law  must  be  made  for  man,  and 
not  man  for  the  law. 

Third.  In  our  expurgated  moral  code  we  must  leave 
out  a  great  many  virtues  and  graces  (as  they  call  them), 
and  cease  from  calling  the  absence  of  them  a  sin.  Half 
of  the  graces  recommended  by  the  Galilean  in  his  "Ser- 
mon on  the  Mount,"  usually  reckoned  the  New  Testa- 
ment version  of  the  law  by  his  followers,  by  men  like  A 
Kempis,  Calvin,  and  Edwards,  should  be  omitted  ;  such 
as  poverty  of  spirit,  humility,  meekness,  sorrow  for  sin, 
self-sacrifice  !  I  agree  with  Hume  in  regarding  these  as 
simply  showing  abjectness  of  spirit  and  as  being  incon- 


What  Morality  have  We  Left?  6i 

sistent  with  that  manliness  which  has  led  to  the  glorious 
deeds  of  which  our  world  is  proud.  It  is  a  maxim  in 
jurisprudence  not  to  prescribe  laws  which  cannot  be 
obeyed,  and  which  therefore  only  provoke  rebellion  and 
a  multiplication  of  offenses.  It  is  time  that  a  like  principle 
be  laid  down  in  morality.  Spencer  has  so  far  helped  this 
important  practical  principle  by  drawing  the  distinction 
between  absolute  and  relative  morality,  the  latter  suiting 
itself  to  circumstances. 

FonrtJi.  Certain  acts  forbidden  by  divines,  by  ascetics, 
and  by  our  Puritan  forefathers,  must  be  freely  allowed. 
The  ball-room  must  be  thrown  open  ungrudgingly,  even 
the  masquerade  ball,  which  calls  forth  the  actor  talent. 
The  theatre,  so  far  from  being  denounced,  must  be  en- 
couraged, as  one  of  our  schools  of  refinement  and  virtue, 
and  giving  us  deep  insight  into  human  character.  We  are 
not  to  be  prevented  from  receiving  enjoyment  from  the 
genius  of  Sara  Bernhardt  by  prudish  considerations,  which 
in  most  cases  are  pharisaic.  In  lessening  the  number  of 
commandments  (the  word  is  irritating)  we  should  certainly 
leave  out  the  fourth,  requiring  us  to  remember  (we  should 
rather  seek  to  forget)  the  Sabbath  to  keep  it  holy  (that  is 
in  attending  preaching  conventicles)  ;  though  of  course 
health  and  convenience  will  persuade  us  to  adopt  practical 
means  for  giving  leisure  to  the  v/orking-classes  and  to  all 
men,  amusements  being  provided.  Happily,  the  great 
men  who  are  doing  most  to  widen  the  boundaries  of  science 
are  also  seeking  to  remove  the  restrictions  to  Sabbath 
freedom.  Huxley  and  Tyndall,  by  their  lectures,  have 
struck  a  blow  at  the  Puritan  Sabbath  from  which  it  will 
never  recover,  though  it  may  continue  to  kick  and  groan 
till  it  breathes  its  last.  By  the  removal  of  such  restrictions, 
the  number  of  supposed  sins  will  be  much  diminished  and 
painful  reproaches  become  few  and  slight. 

Fifth.  In  regard  to  the  marriage  relation,  our  leaders 


62  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

have  not  spoken  out  with  their  usual  clearness.  It 
looks  as  if  they  were  afraid.  Those  who  follow  them 
will  not  be.  It  is  evident  that  they  all  approve  of  some 
modification  of  the  Biblical  law,  and  have  hinted  that  it 
ought  to  be  changed.  What  they  have  not  codified  they 
have  recommended  by  their  example.  Goethe  lived  a 
considerable  p'ortion  of  his  life  with  his  housekeeper  as  if 
she  were  his  wife.  Comte,  founder  of  positivism,  the  im- 
mediate predecessor  of  agnosticism,  had  a  rapt  admiration 
of  Clotilde,  his  wife  being  still  alive.  John  Mill  made  love 
to  the  druggist's  wife  while  her  husband  was  living.  Miss 
Evans  lived  with  Mr.  Lewes  while  his  wife  was  not  dead. 
I  observe  with  interest  that  portions  of  the  religious  (so 
called)  press  are  speaking  of  this  lady  as  having  very  pious 
instincts,  and  dying  with  Thomas  a  Kempis  near  her  bed, 
and  a  defence  of  Spinoza  not  far  off.  These  are  the  signs 
and  precursors  of  what  is  coming,  the  streaks  of  light  that 
forecast  the  dawn.  The  wide  license  given  to  divorce  in 
a  number  of  the  American  States,  and  the  thousands  of 
women  in  each  of  our  great  cities  ready  to  welcome  all 
who  call,  clearly  indicates  that  there  must  be  some  regu- 
lated system  of  liberty.  But  the  time  has  not  yet  just 
come  for  speaking  out  on  this  subject. 

At  times  I  heave  a  sigh  because  the  old  moral  truths 
are  dissolving  one  by  one.  But  I  confess  I  do  not  feel  so 
much  in  parting  with  the  cold  and  musty  morality  as  with 
the  warm  religious  truths.  Professor  Goldwin  Smith,  who, 
though  a  bright  writer,  has  never  got  adjusted  into  his 
proper  place  (discontented  with  his  own  Oxford,  and 
America  not  contented  with  him),  thinks  we  are  living  in 
a  moral  interregnum.  Such  interregna  are  dangerous,  as 
the  old  kingdom  is  gone  and  the  new  republic  has  not  got 
its  authority  recognized.  No  one  feels  this  more  than 
Herbert  Spencer.  "  Few  things,"  he  says,  "  can  happen 
more  disastrous  than  the  decay  and  death  of  a  regulative 


What  Morality  have  Wc  Left?  6Ty 

system  no  longer  fit  before  another  and  fitter  regulative 
system  has  grown  up  to  replace  it."  I  know  how  foolish 
it  is  to  move  out  of  a  house  that  has  sheltered  us  till  an- 
other has  been  provided.  But  our  masters  have  told  all 
men  that  the  old  house  is  unstable,  that  the  rotten  ship  is 
sinking,  and  it  is  only  common  prudence  to  escape,  in  the 
hope  of  meeting,  in  the  broad  ocean  on  which  Ave  are  cast, 
some  vessel  to  take  us  in.  I  confess  I  see  no  such  vessel 
near  me,  though  I  know  that  there  is  a  grand  land  at  a 
distance.  In  the  year  I744,  Hume  was  a  candidate  for 
the  chair  of  Moral  Philosophy  in  Edinburgh  University, 
but  did  not  get  the  appointment,  as  people  at  that  stage 
did  not  see  what  morals  he  could  teach  their  young  men 
in  consistency  with  his  system  of  nescience  and  atheism. 
He  had,  in  consequence,  no  opportunity  of  constructing  a 
positive  system  of  ethics  ;  and  no  one  since  his  day  has 
taken  up  the  work.  The  college  in  which  I  was  educated 
did  not  supply  this  want,  and  some  of  us  have  had  to  suf- 
fer all  the  evils  of  the  interregnum.  Our  president  opposed 
the  new  light  coming  in  upon  us.  A  professor  gave  us 
Spencer's  political  science,  but  did  not  take  up  the  moral- 
ity which  ought  to  underlie  and  bear  up  all  social  laws. 
I  have  given  my  reasons  for  not  being  satisfied  with  Spen- 
cer's structure,  which  has  no  foundation  to  rest  on  till  long 
ages  have  passed,  and  leaves  a  thousand  practical  ques- 
tions unanswered.  We  are  arrived  at  the  same  stage  in 
morals  as  we  were  a  few  years  ago  in  religion.  Just  as 
the  evolutionist  a  few  years  ago  placed  in  this  journal 
"  An  Advertisement  for  a  New  Religion,"  so  do  I  now 
formally  insert  An  Advertisement  for  a  Nezo  Morality. 


IV. 

A  REVIEW  OF  THE  FIGHT. 

BY  A  YANKEE  FARMER. 

A  GREAT  many  people  have  not  known  what  to  make 
of  the  articles  in  the  North  American  advertising  for  a  new 
religion,  a  new  standard  of  truth,  and  a  new  morahty.  It  is 
understood  that  some  weak  people  ceased  to  subscribe  to 
the  Reviezv  because  of  their  supposed  irreligious  tendency. 
An  editor  of  an  able  religious  paper  wrote  a  reply  to  them, 
but  was  induced  to  withdraw  it  by  a  wiseacre  who  per- 
suaded him  that  they  were  a  sly  defence  of  religion.  Most 
people  were  curious  to  know  who  could  have  written 
them,  and  wondered  what  was  the  aim  of  the  author  or 
authors.  A  newspaper  writer  of  strong  personal  antipa- 
thies malignantly  ascribed  them  to  a  college  president, 
who  did  not  take  much  pains  to  deny  them  till  he  found 
himself  caricatured,  and  then  could  not  speak  of  them  with 
temper. 

It  so  happened  that  I  am  well  acquainted  with  the  writ- 
ers, who  are  personal  friends  of  mine  own.  The  oldest 
used  to  give  occasional  lectures  in  the  NeAV  England 
academy  in  which  I  was  trained.  The  second  was  an  old 
pupil  of  that  institution,  and  often  visited  it.  The  third 
was  a  fellow-student  with  me  there. 

It  was  the  full  intention  of  my  father  to  give  me  an  edu- 
cation of  the  highest  order,  and  I  was  about  to  enter  the 
famous  university  in  our  neighborhood  when  he  died. 
What  was  I  now  to  do  ?     The  farm  was  a  bare,  gravelly 


A  Review  of  the  Fight.  65 

one,  with  more  rock  and  stones  than  soil,  requiring  much 
care  and  yielding  little  produce.  My  mother  had  nothing 
left  her  but  that  farm.  I  resolved  at  once  to  give  myself 
up  to  her  as  she  gave  herself  up  to  me.  While  my  com- 
panions went  off  joyously  to  the  college,  I  devoted  myself 
to  tilling  and  sowing  ;  and,  upon  the  whole,  I  do  not  re- 
gret the  sacrifice  (as  I  felt  it  at  the  time)  which  I  made. 
I  love  the  old  homestead  with  its  fields,  its  cattle,  its 
horses,  and  fruit-trees,  which  I  have  come  to  look  upon 
as  personal  friends.  I  have  persuaded  myself  that  farm- 
ing is  as  favorable  to  independent  thinking  as  the  student 
life  down  there  in  that  university,  with  its  technical  schol- 
arship, its  sophistry,  and  its  haughtiness.  I  find  that, 
with  Robert  Burns,  I  love,  the  daisy  and  the  mouse  far 
more  tenderly  than  these  college  lads,  who  handle  only 
dried  skeletons.  I  can  follow  the  plow  and  yet  be  musing 
all  the  day  long.  I  have  long  winter  evenings  with  little 
to  do,  and  I  employ  them  in  reading  fresh  books,  lent  me 
by  a  professor  from  the  college  library.  The  pure  air  in- 
vigorates me,  and  the  aspects  of  the  earth  and  sky,  morn- 
ing, noon,  and  evening,  of  spring  and  summer,  of  the  fall 
and  winter,  are  watched  with  interest,  and  are  felt  through 
my  whole  being.  I  feel  as  if  from  my  rocky  height  here 
^  I  could  take  a  fresher  view  of  life,  of  the  world  around 
me  and  the  world  above  me,  than  my  former  school  com- 
panions, who  are  narrowed  by  the  abstractions  of  learn- 
ing. Fortunately,  I  have  been  able  to  keep  up  my  friend- 
ship with  members  of  the  college.  They  come  out  one 
by  one  or  in  little  groups  on  the  Saturdays,  and  tell  me 
what  they  are  doing  in  their  intellectual  gymnasium,  what 
sort  of  man  the  last  appointed  professor  or  tutor  is,  what 
the  latest  original  work  that  has  appeared,  and  what  the 
topics  discussed  in  the  societies  and  in  the  little  clubs.  I 
often  put  on  a  sort  of  inquiring  Socratic  air,  and  question 
them  as  to  the  worth  of  what  they  are  learning  from  these 


66  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

dead  or  living  languages,  metaphysical  subtleties,  and  old 
bones. 

When  the  articles  appeared  in  the  North  American,  I 
recognized  the  writers  at  once.  I  felt  as  if  I  saw  their 
fallacies,  and  was  strongly  tempted  to  answer  and  expose 
them,  the  more  so  as  they  were  after  the  tune  of  the  times, 
and  were  misleading  some  of  these  college  youths.  I 
longed  excessively  to  bring  the  authors  together,  that  we 
might  have  a  symposium,  at  once  of  bodily  and  intellectual 
food.  So  I  asked  them  to  spend  a  spring  afternoon  at 
our  farm.  I  ventured  to  propose  to  my  mother  that  she 
might  ask  the  Agnostic's  lady  to  come  with  him.  Her 
whole  nervous  frame  became  intensely  strung  on  the  in- 
stant. She  evidently  grew  an  inch  or  two  taller.  I  was 
sure  I  saw  sparks  issuing  from  her  eyes.  She  looked  pre- 
cisely like  her  ancestress  who  came  over  in  the  Mayflower, 
and  she  treated  the  proposal  as  indignantly  as  that  ances- 
tress would  have  treated  a  mistress  of  Charles  II.  I  aban- 
doned the  proposal  on  the  instant.  She  wondered  what 
sort  of  thing  a  symposium  was,  and  was  in  doubt  about 
it  till  I  told  her  it  was  to  be  after  the  model  of  the  confer- 
ences in  the  Book  of  Job.  She  was  only  half  satisfied, 
but  told  me  she  hoped  I  would  act  the  part  of  the  young 
Elihu,  when  the  older  men  might  be  "  darkening  counsel 
by  words  without  knowledge." 

The  three  gentlemen  arrived  on  the  appointed  day. 
The  Evolutionist  was  advanced  in  years,  with  a  well-de- 
veloped but  narrow  forehead,  of  the  very  opposite  pat- 
tern to  that  of  Plato,  the  broad-browed.  The  Agnostic 
was  thin,  with  an  expression  of  scorn,  like  that  which  sits 
forever  on  the  face  of  Voltaire.  The  New-Light  Moralist 
was  stout  and  burly,  and  looked  as  if  he  wished  to  enjoy 
life.  My  mother  provided  a  well-loaded  table,  and  I  got 
ghmpses  of  her,  with  her  snow-white  apron,  guiding — or, 
in  fact,  serving — the  somewhat  awkward  Irish  servant. 


A  Review  of  the  Fight.  fi'j 

Our  Evolutionist  praised  the  beef,  and  remarked  that  it 
could  not  have  been  so  excellent  unless  it  had  been  devel- 
oped ;  upon  which  I  simply  remarked  that  the  develop- 
ment of  my  breed  of  cattle,  so  far  from  being  fortuitous, 
had  had  a  good  deal  of  skill  bestowed  upon  it.  The  Agnos- 
tic relished  somewhat  the  flowers  and  fruit,  and  I  said  that 
I  was  glad  he  found  a  reality.  There  was  wine  on  the  side- 
table  (my  mother  would  not  allow  it  on  the  dining-table), 
and  the  Moralist,  as  he  drank  it,  denounced  the  bigoted 
temperance  men  who  were  depriving  people  of  lawful 
enjoyments.  I  hinted  that  the  young  men  down  there 
in  the  college  did  need  to  be  guarded  against  the  terrible 
temptations,  either  after  the  method  of  Mr.  Gough  or  Dr. 
Crosby.  The  conversation  gradually  slid  into  farming 
operations  and  the  topics  engrossing  the  adjoining  uni- 
versity. 

After  the  dinner,  we  retired  to  a  pleasant,  rocky 
height,  whence,  through  the  apple  trees  in  full  blossom, 
we  had  a  distant  glimpse  of  the  ocean  over  which  the  an- 
cestors of  my  mother  sailed,  and  of  the  college  buildings, 
from  which,  though  a  good  many  miles  off,  we  almost 
felt  as  if  we  heard  the  hum  of  the  recitations.  It  was 
agreed,  out  of  courtesy,  that,  as  each  of  the  three  writers 
had  enjoyed  an  opportunity  of  expressing  his  views  in 
full,  I  should  be  allowed  to  answer  them  each  in  turn. 
Two  students,  who  had  come  out  on  their  Saturday  ex- 
cursion, joined  us.  One  of  them,  a  scientific,  sat  with 
a  leer  in  his  eye,  wondering  at  our  foolish  discussion, 
and  evidently  rejoicing  that  he  had  a  fine  scientific 
apparatus  and  a  whole  host  of  fossils  to  go  back  to. 
The  other,  a  big-headed  fellow,  with  shaggy  brows, 
listened  with  intense  eagerness,  industriously  took  notes, 
carried  them  down  with  him  to  his  college,  and  showed 
them  to  his  professor  of  philosophy  and  a  dozen  plod- 
ding students,  who   read   them    with   eyes  as  wide  and 


68  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

as  wise  as  those  of  owls.     The  issue  of  the  whole  is  this 
article. 


FIRST      ROUND.— THE      AGNOSTIC      AND      THE      YANKEE 

FARMER. 

As  I  saw  that,  in  order  to  any  work  being  done,  it  was 
necessary  to  have  some  posts  fixed  to  which  to  tie  our 
ropes,  I  began  with  the  Agnostic. 

Farmer. — I  am  very  anxious  to  know  what  Agnos- 
ticism is.  The  word  has  come  into  use  since  I  left  school. 
I  suppose  it  is  much  the  same  as  used  to  be  called  Nes- 
cience, which,  inconsistently  enough,  professes  to  know 
that  we  can  know  nothing,  and  Nihihsm,  which  proclaims 
that  there  is  nothing  to  be  known,  which  implies  that 
Nihilism  is  nothing,  though  that  of  Russia  knows  how  to 
kill  kings.  These  systems  always  seemed  to  me  to  be 
suicidal,  that  is,  self-destructive — represented  by  the  ser- 
pent which  swallowed  itself,  not  even  leaving  its  tail 
behind. 

Agnostic. — There  have  been  a  great  many  able  Agnos- 
tics from  an  early  date.  Gorgias,  the  sophist  philoso- 
pher, maintained  that  he  could  demonstrate  that  nothing 
exists,  that  if  it  exists  it  is  unknowable,  and  even  if  know- 
able  is  not  communicable.  All  the  Greek  sophists  were 
virtually  Agnostics,  as  they  held  that  man  cannot  discover 
independent  truth.  I  do  not  claim  for  the  fraternity  the 
absolute  skeptics  such  as  Sextus  Empiricus,  who  refused 
to  run  out  of  the  way  of  carriages  coming  upon  him. 
These  men  made  a  great  mistake  in  denying  anything ; 
they  should  have  contented  themselves  with  refusing  to 
affirm.  We  claim  Hume,  who  allowed  the  existence  of 
only  impressions  and  ideas,  without  a  thing  to  impress 
or  a  thing  impressed,  and  Kant,  who  admits  phenomena 
in  the  sense  of  appearances,  with,  it  maybe,  things  behind 


A  Review  of  the  Fight  69 

which  can  never  be  known,  and  Sir  W.  Hamilton,  who 
elaborated  a  theory  to  the  effect  that  "  the  knowledge  of 
nothing  is  the  principle  or  the  consummation  of  all  true 
philosophy."  But  our  Hving  masters  are  Spencer  and 
Huxley. 

Far. — Then  your  Agnostics  are  ignorant  men,  seeing 
that  they  know  nothing. 

Ag. — The  very  opposite.  The  sophists  were  very  in- 
teUigent  men,  teaching  the  highest  class  youths  of  Greece, 
in  the  days  of  Pericles.  Since  the  defences  of  Lewes  and 
Grote  appeared,  the  sophists  are  placed  above  Socrates, 
Plato,  and  Aristotle,  who  were  all  pretenders  to  truth 
which  they  did  not  possess.  Kant  and  Hamilton  were 
profound  scholars.  Huxley,  it  will  be  admitted,  knows  a 
good  bit  of  biology,  and  as  to  Herbert  Spencer,  he  is 
filled  with  universal  knowledge. 

Far. — My  poor  brain  is  becoming  sadly  puzzled. 
These  men  are  evidently  very  learned,  and  I  am  prepared 
to  admire  them  excessively.  I  am  inclined  to  say  of  them 
what  an  Irish  servant  said  of  his  master,  who  got  a  fine 
government  office  :  "  My  master  has  got  a  grand  situa- 
tion ;  he  has  nothing  to  do,  and  he  does  it  well." 

Ag. — That  is  a  caricature  of  our  meaning. 

Far.— What,  then,  do  you  mean  when  you  say,  "We 
know  nothing  ?  " 

Ag. — We  certainly  do  not  know  things.  But,  as  Hume 
allows,  we  have  impressions,  which,  when  reproduced,  be- 
come ideas.  More  philosophically,  we  have  phenomena, 
appearances,  as  Kant  assumed  and  Hamilton  and  Spen- 
cer allow.  But  what  reality,  what  thing  is,  or  things  are 
in  these,  or  beneath  these,  or  above  them,  no  one  can 
tell. 

Far. — In  my  ignorance  and  stupidity  I  always  looked 
on  appearances  as  appearances  of  something — as,  in  fact, 
things  appearing.     Even  that  cloud  consists  of  drops  of 


70  Conjlicts  of  the  Age. 

moisture  which,  in  that  rainbow,  are  tinged  by  beams  of 
the  sun. 

Ag. — They  exist  as  appearances.  What  they  have,  or 
whether  they  have  anything  besides,  we,  in  our  modesty, 
neither  affirm  nor  deny,  for  we  are  not  skeptics. 

Far. — But  if  the  words  you  use  have  any  meaning,  they 
must  have  appeared  to  some  one,  to  you  or  me,  whose 
existence  is  thereby  impHed. 

Ag. — You  are  going  too  fast.  They  are  appearances  to 
us,  who  are  also  appearances,  with  what  reahty  we  know 
not. 

Far. — Then  we  have  a  vast  volume  of  appearances.  I 
am  reminded  of  what  I  read  in  my  school-days,  of  the  ex- 
clamation of  Anacharsis,  the  Thracian  traveller,  as  he  lis- 
tened to  Greek  dialectics,   Vcs  quantum  niJiili! 

Ag. — All  that  Spencer  knows — in  fact,  the  whole  uni- 
verse, so  far  as  we  can  know  it — consists  of  appearances. 
Science,  even  that  of  Newton,  is  nothing  but  the  classifi- 
cation or  arrangement  of  appearances. 

Far. — But  things  are  arranged  according  to  their  quali- 
ties, are  classified  according  to  their  type  and  structure. 
These,  therefore,  must  be  known, 

Ag. — Yes,  known  as  appearances. 

Far. — If  we  know  them  as  appearances,  they  cannot 
be  absolutely  unknown.  I  am  become  intently  bent  on 
finding  out  (I  suppose  I  dare  not  say  knowing)  Avhat  we 
do  know,  and  what  we  do  not  know,  about  these  appear- 
ances. Lately  I  w'as  standing  by  my  plow  in  the  field 
when  the  horses  plunged,  and  the  plow-share  was  knocked 
into  my  leg,  which  has  scarcely  yet  recovered.  What 
known  reality  had  I  there  !     I  suppose  I  had  pain. 

Ag. — This  may  be  allowed  ;  it  was  an  impression.  It 
was  an  appearance,  though  what  the  pain  was  we  cannot 
tell. 

Far. — It  is  useful  to  have  one  reality  conceded.     But 


A  Review  of  the  Fight.  71 

I  had  some  other  appearances  :  a  couple  of  plunging 
horses,  a  Hmb  torn  and  bleeding,  the  wound  continuing 
for  weeks,  remedies  applied,  and  a  healing  process. 
Somehow  I  believe  that  these  existed  just  as  the  pain 
did,  and  that  the  pain  was  felt  by  me  as  a  conscious  being 
taking  pains  to  be  relieved  from  it.  I  believe  in  the  pain- 
ful measures  taken  by  the  surgeon,  and  in  the  very  sur- 
geon himself;  in  the  soothing  imparted  by  my  mother, 
and  in  my  mother  as  thus  soothing  me,  I  feel  that  I  had 
much  the  same  evidence  of  all  of  these.  I  may  allow  you 
to  call  them  phenomena,  but  then  they  are  of  things  ap- 
pearing. It  is  utter  nonsense  to  give  an  abstraction  a 
separate  position  from  the  thing  appearing. 

Ag. — But  do  you  really  go  so  far  as  to  maintain  that 
all  appearances  are  realities  ?  That  this  white  appearance 
is  a  ghost  risen  from  the  grave  ?  That  this  sound  heard 
at  midnight  was  the  attack  of  a  burglar,  as  the  old  maid 
is  sure  it  was  ?  That  every  unexplained  event  is  a  mir- 
acle? 

Far. — I  crave  no  such  application  of  my  maxim.  I  do 
hold  that  every  appearance  implies  a  thing  appearing. 
But  we  may  have  to  make  some  inquiries,  and  exercise 
judgment  in  order  to  determine  what  the  thing  appearing 
is.  An  appearance  literally  is  an  affection  of  the  eye,  and 
this  is  a  reality.  There  may  be  need  of  inquiry,  and 
there  may  be  doubts  as  to  what  caused  the  affection  of 
the  eye.  I  remember  of  my  seeing  a  white  figure  in  a 
grove  near  my  father's  house,  and  of  my  running  into  the 
house  and  declaring  that  I  had  seen  a  ghost.  My  father 
took  me  by  the  hand,  and  we  went  out  to  the  place,  to 
find  that  the  object  was  a  white  sheet  thrown  out  on  a 
tree  and  being  moved  by  the  wind.  A  tree  reflected  in  a 
smooth  pool  is  a  reahty  ;  it  is  light  reflected  from  water, 
though  it  is  not  a  tree  growing  with  its  crown  downward. 
If  there  be  a  real  appearance,  there  must  be  a  thing  ap- 


72  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

pearing,  but  we  may  have  to  make  investigation  before 
we  can  settle  what  the  thing  is— in  fact,  may  never  be 
able  to  find  what  it  is.  In  particular,  the  apparent  decep- 
tions of  the  senses  are  not  real  deceptions.  In  looking 
across  an  arm  of  the  sea,  I  see  a  rock  on  the  other  side 
which  I  believe  to  be  a  mile  off;  but  in  sailing  toward  it 
I  find  it  three  miles  away.  This  is  merely  a  wrong  infer- 
ence, founded  on  the  rule,  correct  enough  in  ordinary  cases, 
but  not  applying  here,  viz. :  that  when  there  are  few  things 
intervening,  the  object  must  be  near.  In  our  common 
books  of  science,  these  mistakes  are  carefully  pointed  out, 
and  the  veracity  of  the  senses  guarded  by  its  being  shown 
that  the  supposed  deceptions  of  the  senses  are  merely 
wrong  inferences  made  in  the  rapidity  of  thinking. 

Ag. — It  is  a  fortunate  circumstance  that  we  have  Kant 
to  fall  back  upon  ;  Kant,  the  most  influential  philosopher 
in  this  century  and  who  is  to  be  so  glorified  this  centen- 
nial year  in  this  country  as  well  as  in  Germany. 

Far. — I  have  observed  of  those  youths,  who,  after  finish- 
ing their  course  in  the  college  down  there,  set  off  for  a 
year  or  two  to  Germany,  that  they  come  back  with  a  most 
formidable  nomenclature,  as  ponderous  as  the  armor  of 
Goliath  of  Gath.  How  I  do  rejoice  to  find  a  youth  rising 
up  to  lay  them  prostrate  with  a  more  primitive  weapon. 
For  they  have  become  unbearingly  haughty,  and  would 
kill  all  who  cannot  pronounce  their  shibboleth  at  the  fords 
of  speculation.  They  are  introduced  at  the  German  uni- 
versities to  a  set  of  distinctions  which  seem  very  deep. 
The  distinction  between  form  and  matter,  subject  and 
object,  (^/r/t^rz  and  a  posteriori,  phenomenon  and  noume- 
non,  by  which  they  are  led  into  a  labyrinth  with  no  clue 
to  bring  them  out.  In  all  these  distinctions,  and  in  the 
nomenclature  expressing  them,  there  are  subtle  errors 
lurking  which  lead  through  idealism  into  scepticism.  The 
Americans,  to  their  credit,  never  followed  Locke  in  deriv- 


A  Review  of  the  Fight.  JZ 

ino-  all  our  ideas  from  sensation  and  reflection,  even  in 
last  century,  when  his  influence  was  so  predominant.  I 
hope  that  in  this  century  they  will  not  give  in  to  Kantism, 
which  provides  only  appearances  with  an  unknown  reality 
beyond.  I  hope  that  this  magnifying  of  Kant  will  only 
lead  to  a  more  thorough  sifting  of  his  critical  method  and 
its  results.  What  we  need  in  the  present  day  is  a  fresh 
study  of  the  mind  by  one  who  knows  both  Locke  and 
Kant,  but  follows  them  only  so  far  as  their  doctrines  are 
an  expression  of  the  operations  of  the  mind.* 

Ag. But  every  educated  man  knows  that  it  has  been 

established  that  heredity  determines  men's  dispositions, 
judgments,  and  opinions.  A  mountain-range  divides  a 
people  of  one  character  and  religion  from  those  of  an- 
other, and  this  because  the  two  peoples  are  of  a  different 
ancestry.  Every  child  is  the  product,  not  just  of  his  im- 
mediate father  and  mother,  but  of  his  progenitors  through 
indefinite  ages.  People  wonder  that  this  infant,  just  born, 
has  a  pug  nose,  which  neither  parent  has.  But  older 
people  can  tell  you  that  there  was  a  grandmother  who  had 
precisely  such  a  nose.  So  there  are  characters  which  seem 
to  separate  from  their  whole  kindred  ;  but  if  we  knew  all 
the  ancestry,  we  should  find  that  we  have  only  a  mixture, 
often  incongruous,  but  sometimes  consistent,  of  the  pecu- 
liarities of  forefathers  and  foremothers.  Judgments  thus 
caused  by  fate  or  fortuity  are  worthless,  and  we  are  not 
sure  that  there  is  truth  in  any  of  them.  In  our  highest 
intellectual  exercises  we  have  only  appearances,  which 
in  other  circumstances  and  with  other  heredities,  might 
appear  very  different. 

Far. — We   farmers  are  inclined  to  attribute  much  to 

*  The  men  with  high  aspirations  who  met  at  Concord  in  August,  wished 
to  throw  back  the  low  materialism  of  the  day.  But  they  will  not  be  able  to 
do  this  with  the  American  public  by  resorting  to  the  forms  of  Kant  and 
Hegel. — Ed. 


74  Co7iflicts  of  the  Age. 

heredity.  We  like  to  have  a  good  breed  of  horses  and 
cattle ;  but  I  prize  the  mettle  of  my  horses  feeding  there 
as  a  positive  and  real  thing,  even  though  it  may  have 
come  from  their  stock.  Whatever  my  ancestors  may 
have  been,  I  have  some  gifts  which  I  claim  as  my  own, 
and  which  I  exercise.  I  have  a  perception  of  things,  and 
a  power  of  judging  them  and  reasoning  about  them.  I 
perceive  the  horses  down  there,  and  know  pretty  well 
which  is  a  good  one.  I  may  have  got  my  power  of  dis- 
cernment from  my  Yankee  mother  ;  but  it  is  mine  now, 
and  I  find  I  can  trust  in  it.  I  know  things  and  the  rela- 
tions of  things.  I  inquire  into  the  past  and  the  distant, 
and  can,  so  far,  anticipate  the  future.  If  this  power  has 
come  from  heredity,  it  is  a  wisely  regulated  heredity, — 
quite  as  much  so  as  that  of  my  horse  there,  the  breed  of 
which  has  been  carefully  attended  to.  I  will  allow  no  man 
to  deprive  me  of  this  power  of  judging.  I  denounce  Ag- 
nosticism as  not  only  false,  but  injurious,  when  it  denies 
me  a  power  of  independent  thought,  and  makes  me  a 
mere  product  of  circumstances — an  advanced  catarrhine 
monkey,  which  somehow  got  the  power  of  speech.  He 
who  regards  himself,  and  allows  himself  to  be  regarded, 
as  a  beast,  will  sink  toward  the  beastly  state.  I  prefer 
dwelling  rather  on  my  heavenly  origin,  and  hope  thereby 
to  be  aided  in  attaining  a  heavenly  character. 

Ag. — But  surely  you  must  be  ready  to  give  up  that 
beauty  with  which  our  later  poets  have  been  daubing  the 
face  of  nature. 

Far. — I  am  sure  that  there  is  more  in  nature  than  mere 
mechanical  force,  or,  as  some  of  you  make  it,  mere  motion. 
I  believe  not  only  in  the  skeleton  of  nature,  but  in  its 
flesh  and  muscles,  and  the  forms  and  colors  with  which  the 
whole  is  clothed.  I  am  sure  we  have  a  perception  of  the 
subhmity  and  beauty  of  the  objects  in  nature  ;  and  these 
proceed  from  and  give  evidence  of  high  qualities ;  of  the 


A  Review  of  the  Fight  75 

power  in  these  rocks  and  waves  and  mountains,  and  the 
proportions  and  harmonies  of  these  stars,  plants,  and 
animals  ;  I  have  the  capacity  and  I  actually  observe  them, 
and  am  sure  they  are  reahties.  I  am  sure  that  higher 
than  these  we  have  moral  and  spiritual  realities. 

_/Vg. — Is  it  possible  that  a  man  of  sense  like  you  can 
really  credit  these  fables  about  an  unseen  world,  which, 
if  it  exists,  cannot  become  known  to  us  ? 

Far. — I  now  clearly  discover  what  is  the  kind  of  truth 
to  which  you  Agnostics  are  so  opposed.  You  believe 
practically  in  meat  and  money  as  at  least  attractive  ap- 
pearances. It  is  not  of  much  moment  whether  you  believe 
in  them  theoretically  or  no,  as  by  hereditary  instinct  you 
will  eat  and  drink  and  seek  honors  and  pleasures  in  life, 
whether  you  do  or  do  not  acknowledge  them  to  be  reali- 
ties. But  when  you  set  aside  moral  and  spiritual  reahties, 
the  existence  of  God,  the  authority  of  a  divine  law,  the 
immortahty  of  the  soul,  and  a  judgment-day,  there  is  no 
natural  inclination  making  us  practically  allow  these  truths 
to  restrain  and  constrain,  to  guide  and  elevate. 

[At  this  stage  my  mother  sent  us  out  some  fine  straw- 
berries, whereon] 

Ag. — These  must  have  come  from  the  South,  as  no 
fruit  is  yet  ripe  in  this  region  of  ours. 

Far. — Good  reasoning  upon  realities  known. 

As  the  strawberries  appeared  and  the  guests  rose  to 
receive  them,  the  burly  New-Light  Moralist  easily  turned 
the  ghostly  Agnostic  out  of  the  way,  as  if  he  were  as  great 
a  nonentity  as  he  affected  to  be,  and  proceeded : 

SECOND  ROUND. — THE  NEW-LIGHT   MORALIST  AND   THE 
YANKEE   FARMER. 

Moralist.  —We  have  had  enough  of  this  nonsense.  I 
am  satisfied  that  there  are  realities,  and  I  am  anxious  to 


^6  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

have  as  many  of  the  good  things  of  this  world  as  I  can. 
I  believe  not  only  in  the  reality  of  the  pleasure  I  have  got 
from  the  strawberries,  but  in  the  excellence  of  the  straw- 
berries, and  in  the  validity  of  the  inference  that  they 
must  have  come  from  a  warmer  climate.  I  acknowledge 
the  force  of  your  arguments  against  my  friend,  who  says 
we  can  know  nothing.  But  you  can  advance  no  such  ar- 
guments against  me. 

Farmer. — You  should  not  be  so  sure  of  this.  You 
admit  that  we  have  perceptions  of  the  senses  external, 
and,  I  may  add,  internal,  that  is,  self-consciousness.  It 
is  possible  that  we  may  have  equally  trustworthy  percep- 
tions of  higher  reahties.  You  put  trust  in  your  intellect- 
ual perceptions.     We  have  also  moral  perceptions. 

MOR. — What  do  you  mean  by  intellectual  perceptions? 

Far. — The  perception  of  the  strawberries,  and  of  the 
validity  of  the  inference  that  they  grew  in  a  warmer 
climate  than  this,  and  all  like  perception  of  objects  and 
logical  conclusions  drawn  from  them,  such  as  the  exist- 
ence of  your  friends  and  their  characters. 

MOR. — It  is  quite  in  my  way  to  admit  all  this.  It  is 
the  result  of  experience. 

Far. — But  an  experience  gathered  by  the  intellect,  in 
which,  therefore,  you  trust. 

MOR. — I  do  not  see  that  you  will  gain  much  by  my  ad- 
mitting this. 

Far, — It  implies  that  we  can  distinguish  between  truth 
and  error.  You  will  admit  that  the  judge  and  jury  in  the 
court  in  which  you  plead  can,  in  certain  cases,  tell  whether 
the  prisoner  is  or  is  not  guilty.  It  is  surely  conceivable 
that  we  should  also  have  moral  perceptions  to  distinguish 
between  good  and  evil.  You  believe  that  the  jury  did 
right  in  finding  that  servant  of  yours  guilty  who  stole  the 
hundred  dollars.  But  are  you  not  also  sure  that  what  she 
did  was  bad  ?     Are  you  not  as  sure  of  this  as  of  the  fact 


A  Review  of  the  Fight.  yj 

that  she  did  the  deed  and  that  the  judge  condemned 
her  ? 

MOR. — I  see  you  adhere  to  the  intuitive  theory  of 
morals.  You  do  not  seem  to  call  in  the  Will  of  God  and 
Scripture,  which  I  am  glad  of. 

Far. — It  has  been  shown  that  virtue  is  good,  not  be- 
cause God  wills  it,  but  that  He  wills  it  because  it  is  good, 
such  being  His  holy  nature.  I  am  not  a  college-bred  man, 
and  I  do  not  know  nor  care  what  they  call  my  view.  I 
do  not  know  that  I  have  any  theory.  But  I  have  a  fact 
of  consciousness  that  both  you  and  I  perceive  certain  deeds 
to  be  good  and  certain  others  to  be  evil.  In  this  way  I 
rise  to  a  law  which  I  find  to  be  the  law  of  God.  The  two 
supply  a  very  deep  foundation  for  morality.  To  which 
theory  do  you  adhere  ? 

MOR. — Certainly  not  to  the  Will- of-God  theory,  nor  the 
intuitive  theory.  I  have  a  partiality  for  the  utilitarian, 
or  rather  the  hedonist  theory,  that  we  should  seek  pleasure 
for  ourselves  and  for  others.  I  believe  in  both  what  we 
now  call  egoism  and  altruism. 

Far. — But  you  acknowledge  that  you  are  not  altogether 
satisfied  with  utilitarianism.  Can  utilitarianism  show  you 
why  you  should  seek  pleasure  not  only  for  yourself,  but 
for  others.  Natural,  that  is,  inherited  instincts  will  lead 
you  to  seek  pleasure  for  yourself,  but  why  should  you 
labor  and  suffer  for  strangers  ? 

MOR. — To  promote  the  interests  of  others  is  often  the 
best  means  of  promoting  my  own. 

Far. — If  this  is  all  the  length  your  altruism  carries  you, 
it  is,  after  all,  only  a  systematic  egoism — that  is,  selfish- 
ness. There  are  cases  constantly  occurring  in  which  men 
do  not  see  very  clearly  how  doing  good  to  others  will  do 
good  to  themselves  ;  to  stand  up,  for  instance,  for  a 
maligned  man,  when  the  community  upon  whose  favor- 
able opinion  our  professional  success  depends  is  set  against 


yS  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

him.  When  such  a  creed  prevails,  we  shall  have  few  of 
those  noble  deeds  of  courage  and  self-sacrifice  of  which 
our  world  is  so  proud.  You  see  at  once  that  hedonism 
has  no  obligation  to  lay  on  you  to  promote  another  man's 
pleasure  ;  it  cannot  show  that  you  ought  to  do  this.  In 
short,  it  fails  to  provide  a  motive  for  promoting  its  own 
end,  that  of  promoting  the  greatest  happiness  of  the 
greatest  number. 

MOR. — I  confess  I  have  some  difficulty  in  determining 
what  the  greatest  number  is,  and  what  is  their  greatest 
happiness.  I  have  no  desire  to  see  slavery  restored  in 
this  country,  but  I  cannot  settle  in  my  mind  whether  the 
colored  people  have  more  pleasure  in  their  present  than 
in  their  former  state.  But  the  utilitarians  lay  down  certain 
regulating  principles  as  to  the  beneficial  tendencies  of 
acts. 

Far. — It  is  all  but  impossible  to  calculate  the  precise 
consequences  of  certain  acts,  and  there  is  a  great  risk  of 
miscalculating  under  the  influence  of  prejudice.  As  to 
the  general  rules  laid  down  by  utilitarians,  it  is  often  dif- 
ficult to  apply  them — to  say  when  they  apply,  or  which 
of  them  does  apply  in  a  given  case.  But  the  grand  diffi- 
culty of  the  theory  lies  in  the  circumstance  that  it  holds 
out  no  motive  to  constrain  men  to  attend,  in  critical 
emergencies  and  when  under  temptations,  to  the  princi- 
ples of  morals.  You  do  not  seem  to  attach  much  value  to 
Herbert  Spencer's  modification  of  the  utilitarian  theory. 

MoR. — You  misunderstand  me.  In  the  end  his  moral- 
ity may  rule  the  world.  Heredity  will  then  make  all  men 
moral.  Pain  will  cease.  Men  will  not  then  need  a  moral 
law.  They  will  be  virtuous  "  as  a  matter  of  course" 
without  its  being  necessary  that  they  should  be  swayed 
by  love.  But  development  is  not  yet  sufficiently  ad- 
vanced to  accomplish  this.  We  who  live  in  the  period 
of  "  struggle  "  often  do  not  know  what  to  do. 


A  Review  of  the  Fight.  79 

Far. — I  see  no  evidence  that  development  is  fitted  to 
remove  either  pain  or  sin  from  our  world,  though,  if 
guided  by  God,  it  may  lessen  both.  Certainly  they  both 
exist  at  present,  and  ethics  should  teach  us  how  to  act  in 
a  state  of  things  in  which  they  abound.  But  Mr.  Spencer 
has  introduced  what  he  calls  a  rational  utihtarianism, 
which  "  deduces  from  the  laws  of  life  and  the  conditions 
of  existence  what  kinds  of  action  necessarily  tend  to  pro- 
duce happiness,  and  what  kinds  to  produce  unhappiness. 
Having  done  this,  its  deductions  are  to  be  recognized  as 
laws  of  conduct,  and  are  to  be  conformed  to,  irrespective 
of  a  direct  estimation  of  happiness  or  misery."  The  old 
objection  applies  to  this,  that  it  contains  no  motive  to 
constrain  attention  to  deductions.  What  does  he  mean 
by  the  "  laws  of  life  ?  "  I  am  afraid  some  would  not  un- 
derstand them,  and  many  would  not  feel  any  obligation 
to  attend  to  them. 

MOR. — He  must  mean  the  great  laws  of  development 
and  heredity,  the  laws  derived  from  the  gathered  and  in- 
herited experience  of  ancestors,  brute  and  human. 

Far. — But  that  experience  is  not  uniform.  Some  of  our 
ancestors,  among  the  lower  animals  and  men,  have  been 
cruel ;  some  are  deceitful — do,  in  fact,  live  by  guile  ;  others 
are  sensual.  There  is  the  fierceness  of  the  tiger,  the  cun- 
ning of  the  fox,  and  the  grossness  of  the  pig.  These 
qualities,  it  may  be  supposed,  are  going  down  in  the  de- 
scent. Are  we  to  follow  these,  because  they  come  from 
our  fathers  ?  Or  are  we  to  resist  and  reject  them — or,  at 
least,  some  of  them  ?  If  so,  it  must  be  from  some  law 
separate  from  and  distinct  from  heredity,  above  heredity, 
and  to  which  heredity  should  yield. 

MoR. — I  notice  you  are  always  coming  back  to  an  in- 
tuitive perception  of  good  and  evil — that  is,  conscience. 
You  know  that  it  has  been  shown  that  conscience  is  the 
product  of  heredity,  and  in  that  respect  is  like  the  other 


8o  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

animal  propensities,  and  carries  with  it  no  peculiar  weight. 
Darwin  has  shown  that  it  appears  in  the  lower  animals. 
You  may  see  evidence  of  it  in  the  look  and  attitude  of 
the  dog,  when  he  has  done  a  deed  fitted  to  please  his 
master,  and  in  his  running  off,  with  his  tail  between  his 
legs,  when  he  has  offended.  It  can  carry  with  it  no  au- 
thority. 

Far. — It  may  carry  with  it  as  much  authority  as  the 
intelHgence  which  you  believe  to  be  also  the  consohda- 
tion  of  hereditary  experience.  Your  understanding  may 
have  been  developed,  but  you  are  sure  it  speaks  true 
when  it  declares  that  all  the  angles  of  a  triangle  are  equal 
to  two  right  angles,  that  you  were  once  at  college,  that 
you  are  now  a  lawyer,  and  that  the  judge  decided  the 
case  against  your  servant.  May  not  your  moral  nature 
be  equally  right  in  declaring  that  the  deed  of  the  servant 
was  wrong  and  the  sentence  of  the  judge  just,  and  that 
you  are  entitled  to  demand  that  your  clients  pay  their 
fees  ? 

MOR. — I,  too,  believe  this  ;  but  this  not  because  of  that 
fallible  conscience.  I  decide  thus,  because  I  see  what  evil 
would  arise  from  not  punishing  my  servant,  and  from  al- 
lowing those  for  whom  I  have  labored  to  pay  my  fees  or 
not,  as  they  please. 

Far. — This  is  falling  back  on  utilitarianism,  the  weak- 
ness of  which  you  have  exposed.  Your  account  of  the 
nature  of  conscience  in  your  article  is  very  graphic  ;  but 
you  are  evidently  laboring  under  a  misapprehension  as 
to  its  function.  You  suppose  that  the  conscience  is  the 
moral  law  itself,  and  is  to  be  regarded  as  infallible  ;  but 
this  is  a  mistake.  Let  me  explain  what  I  mean  by  an  il- 
lustration :  My  mother  has  an  old  clock  on  the  wall,  which 
is  now  usually  silent,  but  which  she  sets  agoing  occasion- 
ally, when  it  sometimes  goes  too  quick  and  sometimes  too 
slow,  and  often  stops.     She  believes   (I  do  not)  that  it 


A  Review  of  the  Fight.  8i 

came  over  in  the  Mayflower.  Now,  we  do  not  regard 
this  clock,  or  any  other  clock,  as  regulating  time,  or  as 
.settling  the  length  of  the  day.  These  are  determined  for 
us  by  the  sun.  But  there  are  two  things  that  the  clock 
does  :  it  exhibits  hours  and  days,  and,  when  it  is  in  a 
sound  state,  it  makes  them  known  to  us.  Precisely  anal- 
ogous is  the  function  of  the  conscience.  It  does  not  con- 
stitute the  good  or  make  the  law.  Its  perceptions  do  not 
render  an  action,  considered  in  itself,  to  be  either  virtuous 
or  vicious.  What  it  does  is  to  reveal  the  quality  to  us» 
It  is  not  my  eye  which  makes  the  apple-tree  before  us — 
it  simply  makes  it  known  to  us.  Just  as  little  do  the  de- 
cisions of  the  conscience  constitute  the  goodness  of  an 
action.  The  tree  exists,  and  truth  exists,  and  moral  good 
exists,  whether  the  intellect  or  the  conscience  perceives 
them  or  no.  The  moral  and  intellectual  powers  are 
merely  the  organs  through  which  the  good  and  the  true 
are  disclosed.  And  as  the  eye  may  be  diseased,  so  may 
the  conscience,  and  the  intellect  too,  become  perverted. 
But  the  eye  implies  an  object  to  be  seen,  and  the  intellect 
implies  that  there  is  truth ;  so  the  conscience  implies  that 
there  is  moral  good,  which  shines  up  there  in  the  sky 
even  when  there  is  (as  now)  a  cloud  concealing  it.  There 
are  standards  of  truth,  as  in  mathematics,  even  when  the 
boy  makes  mistakes  in  his  demonstrations.  So  there  is 
a  moral  standard,  even  when  men  do  not  attend  to  it. 
That  standard  is  not  the  conscience,  but  the  moral  law, 
which  is  the  law  of  love— that  is,  law  and  love ;  the  law 
requiring  and  regulating  love.  The  conscience  may  vacil- 
late, and  even  err  ;  but  the  moral  law  is  immutable  and 
eternal. 

MoR. — But  you  make  that  law  too  pure  and  lofty— as 

high  and  unbearable  as  the  midday  sun  is  to  the  eye.     It 

frightens  the  young,  and  is  offensive  to  all,  because  it  is  so 

stiff  and  rigid.     I  do  not  propose  to  do  away  with  law, 

6 


82  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

but  it  should  accommodate  itself  to  our  nature  and  to  cir- 
cumstances, and  admit  exceptions. 

Far. — A  military  officer  cannot  exact  obedience  be- 
yond his  own  province — cannot,  for  instance,  demand  a 
special  religious  belief  from  his  soldiers  ;  but  in  his  own 
domain  he  cannot  allow  exceptions  to  his  orders.  The 
magistrate  cannot  stretch  his  penalties  beyond  his  own 
field,  which  is  that  of  property  and  life ;  but  in  his  own 
jurisdiction  he  cannot  allow  people  to  keep  one  law  and 
break  another ;  to  steal,  provided  he  does  no  murder ;  to 
raise  a  drunken  disturbance  on  the  streets,  and  be  guilty 
of  seduction,  provided  he  be  honest.  If  God's  law  be 
holy,  just,  and  good,  He  must  require  perfect  obedience. 
What  God  requires  is  love  under  law,  and  He  demands 
attention  to  its  requirements. 

MOR. — But  why  place  the  ideal  so  high? 

Far. — It  is  of  vast  moment  to  have  a  model  before 
every  man,  and  before  society,  to  keep  them  from  falling, 
and  to  lift  them  up  when  fallen.  Your  principles  would 
produce  a  state  of  society  like  that  in  the  time  of  the  Ro- 
man Emperors  Augustus  and  Tiberius,  like  that  of  Louis 
XV.  in  France,  and  like  that  of  Charles  II.  in  England, 
from  which  all  men,  perceiving  the  evils,  turned  away  with 
such  a  terrible  revulsion.  You  object  specially  to  the 
Sabbath  ? 

MOR. — Certainly,  because  so  gloomy. 

Far. — I  have  always  looked  on  the  Sabbath  as  one  of 
the  most  beneficent  of  our  institutions.  It  is  so  to  me, 
my  household,  and  my  horses,  obliged  to  toil  all  the  rest 
of  the  week.  I  have  observed,  too,  in  my  rare  travels, 
that  in  France,  in  Germany,  and  in  certain  parts  of  our 
Western  country,  the  people,  though  well  enough  edu- 
cated in  the  elementary  schools,  have  less  intelligence, 
because  they  have  no  quiet  Sabbath  on  which  to  think 
and  keep  up  their  reading. 


A  Review  of  the  Fight  %'i^ 

MOR. — But  we  might  have  all  this  without  making  the 
day  so  awfully  sacred. 

Far. — The  difficulty  would  be,  without  a  divine  sanc- 
tion, to  make  people  combine  as  to  the  time,  and  to  im- 
pose and  obey  the  necessary  restrictions.  The  selfish  mas- 
ter would  insist  on  labor  from  his  dependents  in  certain 
circumstances — the  merchant,  for  instance,  when  he  had 
pressing  lucrative  orders.  The  pleasure-loving  would  insist 
on  amusements,  requiring  labors,  which,  so  far  from  being 
amusements,  imply  severe  toil  among  vast  multitudes. 
You  may  say  law  should  secure  the  restrictions ;  but  laws, 
under  popular  governments,  can  only  be  passed  where 
there  is  a  popular  sentiment  in  their  favor,  and  such  laws 
would  not  be  passed  in  a  state  of  society  such  as  I  have 
pointed  to.  Besides,  even  though  law  might  enjoin  a  day 
of  rest,  it  could  not  make  men  engage  in  elevating  exer- 
cises—in short,  to  remember  the  Sabbath  day  to  keep  it 
holy.  Our  forefathers  may  on  some  points  have  been 
too  stern  ;  but  their  descendants,  with  their  railway  trav- 
elling, their  reading  of  novels  and  secular  papers,  and  their 
theatre-going,  may  be  rushing  to  the  opposite  and  worse 
extreme.  I  know  a  promising  young  man  from  this  neigh- 
borhood, who  went  into  a  newspaper  office  where  he  had 
to  work  the  whole  Sabbath  :  he  struggled  for  a  time,  and 
then  lost  all  sense  of  everything  spiritual.  I  am  told  that 
he  now,  to  justify  his  course  to  himself,  writes  the  pun- 
gent articles  in  his  organ  against  the  Puritan  Sabbath. 
The  Sabbath  (like  every  precept  of  the  law)  was  made  for 
man  by  the  God  who  made  him,  and  knows  what  he  needs, 
and  has  set  apart  this  day  to  give  him  rest  and  leisure  for 
holy  meditation. 

The  Evolutionist  here  interposed.  As  he  had  been  at 
one  time  my  preceptor,  as  his  head  was  all  silvered  over 
where  it  was  not  bald,  and  as  his  manner  of  late  had  be- 


84  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

come  more  subdued  and  less  dogmatic,  I  treated  him  with 
more  respect  than  I  did  the  younger  men. 

THIRD    ROUND. — EVOLUTIONIST  AND   YANKEE   FARMER. 

Evolutionist, — I  wish  you  all  to  understand  that  I 
disapprove  of  these  attempts  to  undermine  morality.  I 
believe  them  to  be  injurious  to  the  best  interests  of  the 
race. 

Farmer. — It  may  be  as  well  for  you  to  know  whither 
Agnosticism  is  tending,  and  the  consequences  which  some 
are  drawing  from  Evolution.  We  are  come  to  a  time  in 
which  we  have  to  examine  the  foundations  of  morality  as 
well  as  of  religion. 

Ev. — I  certainly  wish  to  retain  the  morality,  but  to 
separate  it  from  religion,  which  I  also  wish  to  retain,  but 
in  a  higher  form. 

Far. — But  you  must  be  aware  that  those  who  have 
undermined  the  religion  have,  in  the  very  act,  shaken  the 
morality.  You  will  have  to  consider  whether  the  princi- 
ples of  an  evolution  without  a  religion,  without  a  God, 
and  without  a  fixed  moral  law,  will  not  lead,  logically  and 
practically,  to  the  low  and  loose  morality  which  our  friend 
has  been  recommending,  and  which  you  are  condemning. 
These  discussions  as  to  religion  and  morality  will  require 
those  who  are  not  to  abandon  both  to  build  up  from  the 
very  foundation,  when  they  may  find  that  the  same  deep 
principles  which  bear  up  morality  are  guaranteeing  the 
fundamental  truths  of  religion.  You  know  that  the  great 
body  of  Evolutionists  and  all  Agnostics  regard  conscience 
as  developed,  and  the  product  of  circumstances,  and  there- 
fore having  no  absolute  claim  on  obedience.  What  foun- 
dation have  you  left  for  morality  ?  I  am  afraid  that,  like 
our  Moralist  here,  you  will  have  to  advertise  for  a  new 
ethics,  as  well  as  a  new  rehgion. 


A  Review  of  the  Fight.  85 

Ev. I  have  always  held  that  we  should  all  promote 

the  general  welfare.  I  admit  the  difficulty  of  the  great 
body  of  mankind  being  able  or  willing  to  find  what  that 
welfare  is  or  requires.  But  all  men  have  kind  social  in- 
stincts and  a  hereditary  conscience,  and  our  aim  should 
be  to  create  such  a  public  sentiment  as  to  incline  men  to 
what  is  good. 

Far. — But,  in  the  case  of  many,  all  these  may  be  coun- 
teracted and  thwarted  by  selfishness,  by  lusts,  and  pas- 
sions, which  need  a  positive  law  to  lay  a  restraint  on  them. 
I  fear  that  your  philosophy  tends  to  weaken  these  senti- 
ments— which  are,  after  all,  mere  aids  to  virtue — as  show- 
ing that  they  have  no  foundation  ;  and  you  will  find  it 
difficult  on  your  principles  to  create,  or  even  keep  up,  a 
public  feeling  ready  to  stand  by  a  high  and  severe  moral- 
ity. What  think  you  of  those  renowned  writers,  male 
and  female,  more  than  once  referred  to  in  these  articles, 
who  lived  as  husband  or  wife  with  those  to  whom  they 
were  not  married  ? 

Ev. — I  regret  their  conduct.  I  believe  in  marriage  and 
monogamy.  Have  you  had  no  such  illicit  intercourse 
among  professing  Christians,  who  managed  to  keep  their 
acts  concealed  ? 

Far. — Yes  ;  but  we  have  a  moral  law  which  condemns 
them,  and  which  has  created  a  public  sentiment  which 
also  condemns  them.  Remove  the  law,  and  the  senti- 
ment will  evaporate  and  disappear,  and  the  practice  will 
become  general— like  the  keeping  of  mistresses  by  kings 
two  hundred  years  ago — because  there  is  nothing  to  re- 
strain it.  Such  conduct  on  the  part  of  professing  Chris- 
tians is  censured  severely,  and  no  one  is  tempted  to  copy 
it.  But  many  feel  as  if  your  evolutionary  ethics  utters  no 
such  condemnation,  and  many  may  be  led  to  imitate  the 
persons  to  whom  we  have  referred,  because  of  their  genius. 
It  is  surely  very  unwise  to  separate  religion  and  morality. 


S6  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

The  moral  law  in  the  heart  seems  to  point  to  a  law-giver, 
and  religion  gives  a  motive  power  to  humanity.  The 
great  German  metaphysician,  Kant,  showed  that  the 
moral  reason,  whose  law  he  described  as  the  categorical 
imperative,  implied  responsibility,  a  judgment-day,  and 
God  as  judge;  and  these  are  the  great  truths  of  natural 
religion. 

Ev. — I  suppose  you  give  up  the  argument  from  design. 

Far. — I  do  not.  As  our  moral  nature  demands  a  law- 
giver, so  our  rational  nature  demands  that  there  be  a  de- 
signer, the  cause  of  the  adaptation  or  design  we  see  every- 
where. There  is  design  in  the  eye,  though  it  is  liable  to 
defects.  Helmholtz  has  made  the  statement  already  quo- 
ted, but  has  also  said  emphatically  that  if  the  eye  were  so 
constructed  as  not  to  be  so  liable,  it  would  not  be  fit  for 
the  ordinary  uses  of  life.  A  penknife  cannot  cut  down 
an  American  forest,  but  may,  notwithstanding,  be  ad- 
mirably adapted  to  its  own  end. 

Ev. — Do  not  understand  that  I  am  opposed  to  religion. 
I  do  not  wish  to  deprive  yoUj  my  young  friend,  of  your 
faith.  I  should  not  like  my  lovely  adopted  daughter  to 
give  up  her  prayers  and  attendance  at  public  worship. 
But  I  confess  I  am  not  satisfied  with  any  existing  religion. 

Far. — I  believe  the  answers  to  your  advertisement  for 
a  new  religion  have  convinced  you  that  there  is  no  hope 
of  your  getting  a  new  rehgion  capable  of  standing  a  mo- 
ment's scrutiny. 

Ev. — I  was  sincere  in  my  advertisement.  I  did  wish 
to  have  a  satisfactory  religion.  I  have  usually  attended 
the  Unitarian  Church,  because  there  is  nothing  to  offend 
me,  while  there  was  nothing,  I  confess,  to  meet  my  felt 
wants.  It  still  professes  to  cling  to  Scripture,  with  which 
it  is  evidently  not  consistent.  As  I  cannot  live  in  a 
vacuum,  I  am  becoming  wearied  of  it.  There  is  evidence 
that  man  is  everywhere  predisposed  toward  religion. 


A  Review  of  the  Fight.  87 

Far.— The  evolutionists  explain  this  by  heredity.  I 
explain  it  by  the  felt  needs  of  man  and  his  rational  nature, 
handed  down,  it  may  be,  from  ancestors.  You  proceed 
upon  the  fact  that  man  has  a  capacity  of  judging  and  de- 
ciding ;  and,  acting  on  it,  you  condemn  the  heathen 
superstitions.  On  like  grounds  I  argue  that  man  has  a 
moral  and  spiritual,  or  rather  that  these  are  part  of  his 
essential,  nature. 

Ev.— But  what  am  I  to  believe  ?  I  am  not  satisfied 
with  your  Scriptures.  There  are  some  things  in  the  ear- 
lier books  which,  as  Mr.  Mill  says,  are  barbarous;  such 
are  the  cruel  wars  and  the  gross  immoralities  practised  by 
persons  who  are  recommended  to  us  as  exemplars.  I 
cannot  believe  in  their  inspiration. 

Par.— Better  leave  the  question  of  plenary  inspiration 
aside  till  we  ascertain  whether  there  is  not  something 
superhuman  in  them.  When  we  have  determined  this, 
on  good  evidence,  we  may  discover  some  means  of  ac- 
counting for  what  is  evidently  human  being  allowed  to 
remain  The  Scriptures  often  narrate  events  and  picture 
characters  in  dark  enough  colors.  But  they  show  us  a 
clear  advance,  and  they  give  us  enough  to  hft  us  above 
the  rudeness  and  vice  prevalent  in  the  barbarous  ages. 
Their  precepts,  sanctioned  by  God,  such  as  the  deca- 
logue, the  moral  maxims  of  the  prophets,  the  discourses 
of  Christ,  and  the  epistles  of  Paul,  Peter,  and  John,  have 
been  the  main  means  of  promoting  thought,  science,  and 
civilization  in  modern  Europe  and  in  America. 

Ev.— I  observe  with  interest  that  Mr.  Froude,  in  his 
lately  published  work  on  Bunyan,  has  taken  the  same  po- 
sition as  I  have.  With  a  great  admiration  of  this  great- 
est (except  one  other)  speaker  in  parables  he  maintains 
that  with  the  light  now  shed  abroad  by  science  it  is  not 
possible  for  any  educated  man  to  believe  as  he  did. 

Far.— I  have   been   reading  the  work  to  which  you 


88  Conflicts  of  the  Age, 

refer.  I  have  a  high  opinion  of  Mr.  Froude's  pictorial 
power  in  narrative,  but  not  of  his  good  sense  or  accu- 
racy. Once  a  clergyman  of  the  Church  of  England,  he 
still  longs,  in  a  plaintive  tone,  for  a  religion,  but  acknowl- 
edges that  he  does  not  know  whether  it  will  ever  come  or 
whence  it  can  come.  Meanwhile,  having  lost  his  own 
faith,  he  would  deprive  our  young  men  of  theirs,  by  as- 
suming that  Christianity  cannot  stand  in  the  light  of  mod- 
ern science.  In  science  I  prefer  listening  to  Prof.  Tait, 
that  big-headed  man,  deep  in  quaternions  and  physics. 
I  do  not  know  that  the  professor  is  a  religious  man,  but 
it  does  one  good  to  hear  him  indignantly  denouncing 
those  who  affirm  that  science  has  set  aside  religion.  He 
defies  them  to  prove  that  any  settled  doctrine  of  science 
is  opposed  to  our  faith.  I  affirm  that  there  are  more  peo- 
ple in  our  day  believing  in  Bunyan's  doctrine  of  sin  and 
salvation  than  there  were  in  his  own  day  when  educated 
men  despised  the  tinker.  Many  abler  men  than  Mr. 
Froude  have  submitted  to  the  Cross  and  found  it  to  be  to 
their  stability  and  comfort. 

Ev. — There  are  doctrines  which  I  cannot  swallow.  I  do 
not  refer  to  such  high  dogmas  as  Predestination  and  the 
Trinity,  to  which  so  many  of  my  Unitarian  friends  object. 
For  the  great  body  of  philosophers,  including  Mr.  Mill, 
have  held  a  doctrine  of  necessity,  a  more  forbidding  doc- 
trine than  fore-ordination,  which  implies  something  of 
will  in  man,  and  a  wise  God  who  governs.  If  there  be  a 
God,  which  I  do  not  deny,  though  I  am  in  perplexity  on 
the  whole  subject.  His  nature  must  be  so  high  and  mys- 
terious that  I  can  conceive  there  should  be  in  it  a  Trinity, 
or  threefold  distinction,  as  well  as  an  essential  unity.  But 
the  doctrine  of  a  blood-atonement  I  cannot  stand  ;  it 
seems  to  me  so  unworthy  of  God. 

Far. — Many  profound  thinkers  have  felt  this  to  be  the 
grand  reconciUng  doctrine  of  God's  government  in  a  world 


A  Review  of  the  Fight,  89 

in  which  God,  represented  by  His  law,  is  holy,  and  man 
is  an  acknowledged  breaker  of  that  law,  in  which  there 
are  both  good  and  evil,  both  optimism  and  pessimism. 
No  one  knows  better  than  the  evolutionist  that  the  world 
has  been  a  scene  of  contest  from  the  beginning — first  a 
struggle  for  existence  in  the  animal  ages,  and  now  a  con- 
test between  the  evil  and  the  good.  In  the  atonement 
God  is  just,  and  yet  the  justifier  of  the  ungodly,  while  the 
heart  of  the  sinner  is  won  by  the  manifestation  of  love. 

Ev. — There  is  much  in  Christianity  that  commends 
itself  to  me.  In  particular,  the  character  of  Jesus  is  so 
unique ;  so  perfect  in  purity,  in  heavenliness,  in  love,  in 
tenderness  and  sympathy,  that  I  am  obliged  to  acknowl- 
edge that  I  cannot  understand  how  a  Jew,  a  Galilean,  a 
Nazarene  could  have  conceived,  much  less  fashioned,  such 
a  character. 

Far. — If  you  only  yield  to  the  attractive  power  of 
Christ,  all  will  come  right  with  you  :  you  will  have  a  body 
of  consistent  and  comforting  truth  to  establish  you,  and  a 
motive  to  live  and  labor,  to  be  good  and  to  do  good. 

By  this  time  the  light  was  failing,  and  we  passed  into 
the  house,  where  we  found  the  evening  meal  prepared  for 
us.  My  mother  asked  me  to  say  grace,  and  as  I  did  so, 
the  Agnostic  gazed  into  the  air,  looking  on  the  grace  and 
the  air  as  equally  phenomenal;  the  Moralist,  being  hun- 
gry, fixed  his  eyes  on  the  food  ;  and  the  Evolutionist 
bowed  his  head  reverently  and  was  pained  because  he 
could  not  say  amen.  Shortly  after  we  parted,  each  one 
following  his  own  thoughts,  to  bear  him  I  know  not 
whither ;  but  as  our  controversialists  are  possessed  by  an 
irresistible  cacocthcs  scribendi  we  will  doubtless  hear  from 
them.  It  is  as  well  that  people  should  know  that  these 
men  under  various  names  and  in  various  guises  are  the 
chief  contributors  to  certain  liberal  organs  of  the  periodical 


90  Conflicts  of  the  Age. 

press ;  and  we  should  now  be  able  to  detect  their  style 
even  when  they  do  not  attach  their  signatures.  Each  is 
constantly  throwing  in  a  new  element  into  the  caldron — 

"  Eye  of  newt,  and  toe  of  frog, 
Wool  of  bat,  and  tongue  of  dog, 
Adder's  fork,  and  blindworm's  sting. 
Lizard's  leg,  and  owlet's  wing  " — 

which  will  continue  to  seethe  and  ferment  till  it  sinks 
into  an  offensive  malarial  residuum,  from  which  all  men 
turn  away.  For  myself,  I  was  humbled  because  I  had 
not  done  justice  to  the  cause  which  I  had  tried  to  sustain, 
but  sure  that  I  was  in  a  more  satisfactory  state  of  mind, 
than  those  abler  men  who  are  seeking  for  truth  without 
finding  it.  I  mean  to  continue  to  pester  these  college 
youths  who  affect  (there  is  a  great  deal  of  affectation  in 
the  whole  thing)  to  believe  in  nothing,  while  each  one  has 
a  firm  conviction  that  he  is  a  "  somebody''  of  no  mean 
importance.  I  observe  that  while  the  wounds,  like  those 
of  Valhalla,  are  bloodless,  yet  when  I  strike  hard  they  are 
annoyed.  They  do  not  know  when  they  are  defeated,  but 
after  we  have  pierced  them  through  and  through,  take, 
as  beseemeth  ghosts,  very  much  the  same  shape.  But 
for  my  own  amusement  I  mean  to  continue  to  poke  into 
them  that  I  may  notice  how  they  revel  and  writhe.  I 
notice  that  when  they  marry  and  have  several  mouths  to 
feed,  they  give  up  Nihilism. 


